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How the Valley treats experienced people

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Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#161

Post by stanfordkid »

rosege wrote: post #152
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...

You can only really do that if you have hundreds of millions and can negotiate with a major bank to get it done. Most companies don't trade options until after the lockup, and even if they did, you are restricted from doing so by the contract.

You also have to put up a huge amount of capital upfront to purchase the options. For Mark Cuban, this could be done on credit to the bank, but likely not possible for a single digit millionaire.

It was only during a unique period of irrational exuberance that banks were open to underwriting options for such new and untested equities.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#162

Post by kannanvijayan »

This is something that has been bothering me somewhat. The following in particular bothers me a lot:

> "Why are you still working?"

The answer for me is simple - because I want to. I learned how to program at the tender age of 10 using a book that came with a C64 that my dad got for free from a garage sale.

Since those first years, the field at every turn has provided me with new intellectual challenges and as I've progressed I've accumulated different ideas and projects that I'd like to complete. That includes reasonably fleshed out ideas in bioinformatics, in distributed operating systems, in models for runtime type inference for dynamically typed programming languages, virtual machine construction techniques, and more.

I will never have enough time in my life to fully explore all of these - each of them will take years of dedicated effort to actually make something out of - so I have to pick and choose wisely to pursue the projects I care about given the opportunities presented to me.

My version of "cashing out" is basically sticking my money in a savings account and getting back to working on interesting things.. or if I have enough of it, using that money to pay some people to help me explore some of the more interesting things I have in my mental back pocket.

Some of us actually are passionate about our work. I suppose there are many that are in the field simply to make some big money and get out and live "the good life". I consider the life I would live doing that, and it just feels so soul-crushingly boring and insipid. What a waste of a life.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#163

Post by specialist »

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…

1/ Keeping up involves unlearning too. For me, that's the hardest part. Trying to approach everything with a "new mind". Meaning my expectations for how stuff is supposed to work gets in the way of seeing whatever is in front of me for what it truly is.

2/ A fair amount of new stuff isn't better. Or it's a mixed bag. Discerning the Brownian motion from the legit improvements is a lot of work.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#164

Post by mr_custard »

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…

Same here. I've seen so many technologies at this point in my life, that picking up new ones is easy.

It's simply a case of quickly grokking which variation (on an existing technological approach) the new technology is taking.

There really aren't that many new groundbreaking ideas in tech; however, there's a lot of tribalism and silos (especially within individual programming language communities) which mean that old discoveries are often forgotten for a while until they are finally resurrected in a new guise.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#165

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

EliRivers wrote: post #123
chiefalchemist wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

"This kid (i.e., recent grad) reminds me of me." Ah, "culture fit". Looks like me, dresses like me, educated like me, thinks like me.

> Looks like me

The classic signs of 2 words till racism.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#166

Post by paulie_a »

rb808 wrote: post #117
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 agree with you but if a startup really wants people working 80 hours a week, then a family man who wants to work 40 hrs isn't a good match for the firm.

Very few are working a full 40 hours let alone 80. Browsing YouTube and Facebook, chatting with coworkers is usually not working.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#167

Post by aklemm »

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…

Very well-said! Wouldn't it be nice if we knew going in which companies understand this? I'd like to see more companies state these ideas explicitly in their values.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#168

Post by luckydata »

WalterBright wrote: post #20
buoyantair wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me no matter how smart you play, if you are born in this world at a very vulnerable position, like say a marginal group like lgbtq communities in third world or in a war torn area or with disabilities, no matter how smart and hard you work, you are always a few clicks behind those who have the "luck" and everything else on their side. The world is super unfair place and sometimes even if you work really smart a…

I'm talking about the US and being an able-bodied adult.

If after all that happened in the last couple years you still think this country rewards effort and smarts fairly then you live in Lala land, not in the USA.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#169

Post by mtnGoat »

skywhopper wrote: post #100
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…

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…

The only dev I've worked with that I'd elevate to the wizard level... interview was a disaster, it was his first out of college, he was shy, answers were short, etc. We hired him anyways to get favor with his family, figured we would churn him out and keep everyone happy.

Best hire ever! The quiet shy kid could code circles around anyone id met prior.

Oddly he hired someone else with same degree from same well respected school, guy was not even one tenth as useful as the first hire. Third hire from same uni was junk too. That's when I really stopped looking at pedigree or even what degrees the person has, it's never proven to be a great indicator to me.

Edit;spelling.

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