How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#91

Post by zaptheimpaler » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:28 PM UTC

slics wrote: post #88

If one thinks 35+ is to old to code, well I have news for you. At 35+ you learn how to manage time and prioritize better. Life throws another ranch in your bucket of problems, marriage and children. When you are young, you are hired as an engineer to work 40 hours, which we all know very well that working for startups that means 80 hours or you are not putting good effort. Well with a family that’s not possible, as y…

Unfortunately these kinds of shitty recruiters and companies will always be around - none of them are thinking about lofty societal goods like family or what happens 40 years later, they are thinking about how to get the most work for the lowest price for their company. As long as droves of young people continue to flock to tech to try and get their share of the money, hiring is a buyers market. Throwing out old people or young people who dare to demand work-life balance will remain a viable strategy for the buyers and many will do just that.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#92

Post by chiefalchemist » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

Close. But I think it's more along the lines of:

"This kid (i.e., recent grad) reminds me of me. My shit doesn't stink. With my care, I bet his won't either."

vs

"There's no way I wanna be that old guy / gal. I deny the fact that he / she could be my future."

Basically, ego vs fear.

I suspect this confirmation bias contributes to various isms. Racism, sexism, etc. That is, they are not me, and I refuse to see they can be me.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#93

Post by vinceguidry » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

danohuiginn wrote: post #55

vinceguidry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite a distinct lack of egalatarianism, the US remains the place where someone born at the bottom can still climb the social ladder. Billionaire-hood may escape them, but they're not doomed.

Possible, but decreasingly likely. The US is now one of the countries where your success in life is most fully determined by your family background. e.g. it's in the bottom third of the OECD for income mobility, and the absolute worst in the OECD for how much your family background determines your educational success https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi... https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/m…

These statistics all measure the wrong things.

Let me tell you a story of two families. My step-dad was thrust into a parenting role over his siblings, a sister and a brother at an early age. The brother died early, in a train accident. My step-dad married my mother and they're still together, over 20 years later. His sister is on her second marriage.

My aunt's family is constantly teetering on the edge of poverty, having obliterated their family's nest egg over decades of stupid decisions. Our family clawed our way out of low class through pragmatic saving.

Stupid decisions are what make the difference between affluence and poverty in the US. You can have all the money in the world and still be broke. The capacity to make stupid decisions largely comes from childhood. It's the emotional makeup of a household that mostly determines what children are like when they get older. If you grow up in America feeling neglected and abused, you're going to go through strings of bad relationships and that's just going to be your life.

I call America's brand of poverty "emotional poverty." Food on the table, roof over your head, cable TV and video games for entertainment, all things people in other parts of the world can't reliably have, in the US pretty much come out of the tap like water. Even homeless people here have cell phones.

No, what's missing here is emotional warmth. People in the US just can't figure out for some reason how to treat each other well. They eat, but they don't live.

If you're lucky enough to avoid emotional poverty, then you can join America's middle class. If not, you'll fritter away all the money you ever make. It's got nothing to do with how much money your family has and everything to do with how they treat each other.

No statistic could possibly capture this reality.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#94

Post by humanrebar » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

auxym wrote: post #84

nikanj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The college hire might grow to be a grand wizard in 10 years, and become a massive asset to the company. I'm not sure if employers are aware of this, but people staying at companies over 10 years are getting exceedingly rare.

Only because employers don't orient pay and promotion schedules around market rates and experience levels.

If you're ten years at the same company, it's exceptional that you couldn't get an offer for significantly more money. Paying "market rate" is a policy for new hires, not existing devs as much.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#95

Post by marktangotango » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

slics wrote: post #88

If one thinks 35+ is to old to code, well I have news for you. At 35+ you learn how to manage time and prioritize better. Life throws another ranch in your bucket of problems, marriage and children. When you are young, you are hired as an engineer to work 40 hours, which we all know very well that working for startups that means 80 hours or you are not putting good effort. Well with a family that’s not possible, as y…

The distinction between valley culture and everywhere else is never made in these pieces which is a pity. I work in fortune 500s and we’re all 40+ in these companies. I rarely see 20s.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#96

Post by mmirate3 » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #67

mmirate3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler alert: nothing can matter to you once you die. (And everyone dies.)

That’s like saying nothing can matter beyond the spatial extent of your body. Just another dimension.

> nothing can matter beyond the spatial extent of your body

Insofar as the spatial extent of a body is extended by its brain's perception and knowledge ...

... the quoted words form a true statement.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#97

Post by diego_moita » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #70

I am 67, but this story occurred when I was young and just out of college: there was a very old computer programmer at work who had great skill but he miss-applied it. The worse thing he did was writing tortured FORTRAN code that self modified itself at runtime - hardware architecture and operating system dependent binary patches. I promised myself I would never be that guy, read the book ‘The Egoless Programmer’ and…

You touched a different but very important issue: in this industry you need to recycle yourself, you need to stay up to date with new technologies that overcome the old ones. Being old doesn't necessarily means being obsolete, but you need to deliberately avoid obsolescence. Sometimes the new shiny things are actually good.

Some technologies fade and you should avoid fading with them. Assembly programming has become a niche for people that write compilers. FORTRAN is giving space to R and Python. Very few people still write COBOL.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#98

Post by humanrebar » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #58

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…

What do you recommend to handle that? I find it difficult to hire senior developers for junior positions with the salary that goes with it. The biggest obstacle to middle age workers who are shifting career is to be unable or unwilling to take the paycut and downsides that come with a fresh start.

> I find it difficult to hire senior developers for junior positions with the salary that goes with it.

Make the offer. If they turn it down, let them know they can change their minds later.

I always tell engineers looking for jobs that saying "no" is the employer's job. It goes the other way too. Offer the engineer the associate engineer job (or whatever the title is). Let them counteroffer or decide it's a bad fit.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#99

Post by sokoloff » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #66

williamdclt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen anybody that had a "lucky" or "unlucky" reputation. Some people are considered to "have been lucky" at some point in time, but nobody considered to have a "luck" or "non-luck" trait. In other words, I've never observed what you describe, never even heard of it

A quick google search "are some people lucky" will show that people very much believe in luck as a trait. Like I said, it's irrational, but people believe in it. It's a placeholder for someone who succeeds or fails abnormally, without a visible cause. Consider this: You're working at a startup that is struggling, and you're interviewing a candidate whose last 5 startups they worked at folded within 6 months of them b…

If you’re at a startup that’s struggling where hiring decisions are made on superstition, you might be the unlucky one...

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#100

Post by skywhopper » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

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…

As mentioned by another commenter, it’s not actually easy to tell in an interview if someone is a “wizard”. And in fact if that someone has experience different from yours, you are even less well equipped to make that determination. It’s a sad irony that the person best equipped to contribute something new to the team is often overlooked exactly because the team doesn’t recognize their differing expertise as valuable.