Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the Valley treats experienced people

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 508 posts

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#151

Post by dominotw »

samatman wrote: post #4

The 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…

> one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum.

I think we are talking about 45 yr old with 2 kids and a mortgage.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#152

Post by rosege »

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…

If you are ever in a similar situation you might want to look at what Mark Cuban did to manage this risk - described here: http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-anat...

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#153

Post by dannypgh »

vinceguidry wrote: post #93
danohuiginn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, h…

1. This reply seems like "forget hard data, here are two anecdotes" which seems like a poor approach if you're trying to convince [good] engineers.

2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless.

3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#154

Post by badpun »

watwut wrote: post #122
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…

1.) Average stay in company is 2 years, so whether someone grows wizzard in 10 years is immaterial. 2.) If you are hiring for vague sense that person grows in 10 years, you are extremely likely to be biased for all kind if cultural and demographic signals that have zero with actual performance. 3.) Old are not wizards now, for dame reason why young are not wizards now. Nobody can know everything and wizardly is movin…

> Nobody can know everything and wizardly is moving target - half composed of myths and half of smokescreen.

These people do exist, though. Just like in any sufficently deep intellectual field, there are people who are very gifted and have insane focus. Compounded over years, they grow to be real beasts, just listen to any talk by John Carmack or Jonathan Blow. The bad news for the employees is that they tend to start their own companies, as typical firms don't have appropriate spots for them (as someone else mentioned, these people provide 10x value but are typically only paid 1.5x-2x).

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#155

Post by kuhhk »

mcguire wrote: post #144
marktangotango wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And when you do see a 20-something, they're often kind of sketchy, since good ones are preferentially siphoned of into the valley.

> And when you do see a 20-something, they're often kind of sketchy,

That’s not true at all and comes off as elitist. I’ve worked at dozens of Fortune 500 offices for my company, and met some truly talented young (20’s) engineers all over the world. Many don’t want to live in SV, many can’t move because of family, or friends.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#156

Post by nlh »

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…

I'll write a longer post about this one day but you bring up a really good point. Identifying the very specific "greed emotion" that makes us make less-secure financial choices I think is a really valuable skill. That's not to say that you should always ignore it -- but it's important to identify it so you can recognize your motivations for making decisions.

I had a similar issue to you a few years back - I was offered a buyout in a partnership that would have put a nice chunk of $ in my pocket, but I (naively) believed that staying in would put more. It fell apart and ended up being worth much less.

I'm not sure I'd have made a _different_ decision, but I certainly have learned to recognize when these moments appear so I can more rationally understand my own decisions.

Anyway - this is all to say, don't sweat it. You've learned, you're lucky to have picked good companies, now take that wisdom and make a less-greedy decision next time.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#157

Post by curun1r »

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…

Also, sometimes you don't make enough for early retirement because...gasp...you don't prioritize money over everything else. Some of us have tried to use our talents to do things that are socially responsible. Whether it's doing something in the non-profit space, working on a company that targets the underprivileged, something to do with the environment or anything along those lines, not everyone is comfortable invading people's privacy to serve them ads.

So, yeah, some of us are still working because we had the naivete to want to make the world a better place.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#158

Post by mcguire »

shmat wrote: post #87
xuki wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't beat yourself up, hindsight is 20/20.

The only one I beat myself up over is hanging on to options too long, since that was greed. The other decisions were all reasonable given what I knew at the time.

Story of my life. Minus the options.

It would be entertaining[1] to know what proportion of "paper millionaires" in the field do hang on to the money and could retire to the Turks and Caicos. Also what proportion of valley employees become paper millionaires in the first place.

[1] And I mean entertaining because I'm in a bizarrely cynical mood this morning.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#159

Post by sokoloff »

badpun wrote: post #150
halfastack wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A startup that really wants people working 80 hours a week" sounds like the most US thing I've heard/read this month. The US work culture is utterly insane. They say that the Japanese work extreme long hours, but from my experience, it's quite similar for big cities in the US. Sounds like a sure way to a burnout, getting fat, and losing your family.

I wonder if I'm just a lousy human being, or are these startups full of cheats. For me, working 25-30 hours a week (really working, not pretending to work or sitting disengaged in meetings) is probably a long-term maximum of sustainable effort. How the hell are these people working 80 hours a week?

They're not. I've done maybe a dozen genuine 80 hour workweeks in my 30 years since high school. Maybe. At least half of those were in college.

People who claim to be regularly working 80 hours a week are often over-counting ("I can't remember doing anything but sleeping and working last Monday, so I must have been working 16 hours.") and often not actually working during 30-75% of the time they're ostensibly at work. Walk by the random colleague at a random time and note how much time their screen has code on it vs Facebook, YouTube, or an online shopping site. Sure, they might be studying an online course on YouTube or buying a critical piece of lab equipment for work, but more than likely they are just dicking off about half the time.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#160

Post by paulie_a »

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…

I don't discriminate on age but realistically someone is not senior until they have 10 years experience. That generally puts them in their 30s.

The younger ones can overwork themselves, job hop, write bad code. And then an experienced coder can sigh and fix it.

Post reply on HN