How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#171

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:50 PM UTC

sureaboutthis wrote: post #50

tokyodude wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it really depends on lots of factors. My father joined a startup in the late 90s, after 5-6 yrs the company failed. At 60 he was unable to get a new job. I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time. I also know from running my own company with partners back in the mid 90s, we were all early 30s except one partner who was 52ish. When getting health insurance for th…

What's funny is that many young people in the industry now would never think of staying at one place for 3-5 years cause they don't want to invest the time. A neighbor of mine is in his 60s and lost his job the same way. He can run rings around anyone I know but he can't find a job or even get an interview. Bjarne Stroustrup, the C++ creator, wrote a blog post about going for a job interview and being told he "didn't…

> Bjarne Stroustrup

I actually spoke to him at a tech event, he was super nice and I totally don't doubt the 'culture fit'

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#172

Post by strken » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:51 PM UTC

In my past two jobs, I've found that the software engineers who want to still be software engineers in a decade are in the minority - maybe a third of the workforce. If you spent your early career wanting to become a manager ASAP, then maybe it's easy to slip up and think of older software engineers as people who failed to make that transition, rather than dedicated individuals.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#173

Post by mr_custard » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:51 PM UTC

JanneVee wrote: post #45

Well even outside of Silicon Valley the question changes to “why aren’t you a manager yet?”! Annnoying ageist question, despite that my experience is worth the money. You just need to avoid companies that doesn’t value it correctly.

My answer to that question is: "I've tried management and whilst I was told that I was good at it, I didn't enjoy it much - I discovered that I simply enjoy building and creating things, and that's what I do best".

Nevertheless, I appreciate that it's an irritating question, but I usually put it down to lack of empathy and/or life experience of the questioner. It would seem that some people just can't imagine that other people have lives, thoughts and aspirations that are different to their own.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#174

Post by mtnGoat » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #131

sbov wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? The vast majority of coders are not and will never be a "wizard". And that's OK. You can still be valuable to a company if you aren't a recent college graduate or a wizard. Edit: also, be ready to pay through the nose for any actual wizard you want to hire. They ca…

My experience over 25 years suggests that wizards can readily command 1.5-2x and deliver beyond 10x. If you can find and engage them, they're one of the best semi-secret bargains in tech.

But to attract them usually requires a lot more then money. You're project needs to interest them, to start.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#175

Post by chasing » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #114

chasing wrote: post #107

Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em. Also, wealth is the world's shittiest metric for success. I know a ton of people with incredible skills who work rather low-paying jobs because they want to improve the world, follow a particular passion, or whatever.

>>Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em. Well, there are other reasons. People you hire straight out of college tend to feel grateful, and also feel like they need to prove themselves (which is true). So they are usually willing to work extra hard. This can be a good quality, if nurtured properly with guidance and training.

True. I was being a little flip, there. There are also jobs that would be a waste of time or dreadfully boring for senior devs to spend their time on.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#176

Post by mcguire » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:53 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #128

taude wrote: post #105

Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of Elitism if you didn't go to MIT or Harvard, too. I'd like to think more about this and write dome some elegant thoughts, but... I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way…

> I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers. > Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. Which is it? Do you want an older engineer to have the same hiring bar and same compensation or a hig…

"Higher bar, paying less" seems a strange choice, though.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#177

Post by zrobotics » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

badpun wrote: post #154

watwut wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 star…

The other thing is, those 'wizards' typically have deep knowledge, not broad. Would most of either of the two people you mentioned really be all that wizardly at an average web startup?

Sure, a games company or similar, but would Carmack be a 'rockstar' on something like a node.js stack? I'm sure he could pick the tech up quickly, but most of his skills lie elsewhere. And yet there is the expectation in tech that truly experienced people will be good at everything, just look at the post about 'things I don't know' from yesterday to see examples of this expectation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780065

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#178

Post by mtnGoat » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:56 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #65

user5994461 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically I would be fine with that but the recruitment agents (and everyone else) kept telling me to aim high.

The higher offer you get, the more the recruiter gets paid. Consider the interests of the advice giver.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#179

Post by throw2016 » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:56 PM UTC

It's pretty silly for commentators here to not recognize their current thinking rules their future selves out from any respectable employment and existence in the field because of the prejudice and massive assumptions about others their current selves hold. 1 or lets say even 10 out of 100 will strike it lucky, what are the 90 going to do. Retire at 35?

This is exactly like the 'temporarily embarrassed working class' supporting policies against their interests as they expect to be in exploiter roles 'soon'.

This kind of ideology tries to reframe software engineering not as a profession like others but some kind track and field with olympic stars dependent on youth working 100hr weeks to the exclusion of everything else. What happens to the majority for whom this does not pay off? This is self importance taken to delusion. This attitude will not only undermine your experience as you age but also directly reduce the quality of people entering the field as anyone studying now with options cannot logically choose a field where you are expected to work like a dog for long odds where experience does not count.

You reap what you sow.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#180

Post by brian_cunnie » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 3:57 PM UTC

zik wrote: post #11

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…

This kind of ageism isn't really visible to you unless you're the subject of it. Yes, it's real.

I'm 54 and have been working in Silicon Valley/SF since '96.

Ageism: One way to combat it is to have a good network. Of the 7 jobs I've had in the last 20 years, 6 of them were from personal reference (schoolmate, co-worker, friend). You don't need to be a badass, just dependable.

Work around your limitations: I'm not as sharp as I was in my forties, and this is especially apparent when I pair-program with someone half my age. Younger developers have an astounding short-term memory (or, as my brother likes to phrase it, "they have a much larger register set"). As a simple example, we have 3 environments at work, and at any given moment they're being used for different purposes. I write their purposes down on a scrap of paper to keep it straight, but my twenty-six-year-old pair keeps it in his head.

Stay fresh: I know a 69-year-old developer/contractor say to me, "2000 was pretty good but after that the work dried up — I guess they didn't need COBOL programmers anymore". He had never bothered to stay current.

Make no mistake: picking up new skills can be hard. I remember in '86 when a developer in his 50's turned to me and said, "Brian, I'm tired of learning new things." He really liked to bartend though, so I hope that career worked out for him.

And some developers aren't interested in working anymore (I think this can strike at any age). I remember five years ago pair-programming with a developer my age who wanted to reminisce ("Remember when 640kB was a lot of memory?") and show pictures of his grandkids. I felt bad when they let him go, but it was hard getting work done while I was pairing with him.