How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#211

Post by sokoloff » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #176

sokoloff wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My experience on the hiring manager side suggests that when that happens, what's usually going on is that the experienced dev failed to meet the higher (level 3) bar but seemed like they'd be a solid individual contributor at level 2, and therefore received a SWE2/PR2/Foo2 offer.

In other words, "same [lower than they expected] bar, same [lower than they expected] salary" as someone 2-3 years in industry.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#212

Post by wildmindwriting » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #83

My team has five middle-aged guys[1] on it, myself included, out of a total of 9. Three of the other four were hired by me. I can only live in hope that next time I need a job I'll be able to find somewhere that values experience as much as we do[2]. [1] It's changing slowly but female software engineers are very much in the minority in Cambridge. I suspect, although cannot prove, that the skew is even more pronounce…

I have noticed the female SWE are in the minority in the Boston/Cambridge area, too.

At my first company in Boston, I was the first and only female programmer for a good year and it wasn't for lack of trying to hire more. I don't remember another female programmer on the web side (there were quite a few on the hardware side) but most of the team was over 30, with family, and was a good range of ages.

Now, I manage a team of five developers, only one of which is another woman. I'm 40 and she is 64. Then again, the youngest person on my team is 35 so we don't seem to have the problem of ageism in our company, thankfully. When we were looking for extra help, it was very difficult to even get people in to interview, let alone someone experienced enough. I'm hoping the job market for tech continues when I need a job again!

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #109

I think I must be one of the younger people on this site because while I agree ageism is a bad thing in the sense that age should simply not be a factor when it comes to hiring/pay, and that experience is good, I also have direct experience working with older developers who didn’t know the new tools we were trying to use (in my case, AI and big data) very well and so weren’t any more productive / were less productive…

The value of older, more experienced workers is the wisdom they've accrued over the years. There's a reason they don't jump into every new fad that comes along and stick with tools that they know work.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by romeisendcoming » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #109

I think I must be one of the younger people on this site because while I agree ageism is a bad thing in the sense that age should simply not be a factor when it comes to hiring/pay, and that experience is good, I also have direct experience working with older developers who didn’t know the new tools we were trying to use (in my case, AI and big data) very well and so weren’t any more productive / were less productive…

There is a limit on where kafka and cassandra are best solutions for your domain. Anyone who only knows SQL and windows server shouldn't be working on new technology stacks.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by romeisendcoming » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

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…

Nailed it with the last sentence.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by zrobotics » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #73

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…

Slightly OT, but hasn't this changed in recent years? I'm not in the industry, but I'd heard that things like EA_STL had gone out of fashion in favor of just using STL. If this is the case, are there any resources for what to be wary of in the STL?

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by fourthark » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #137

I dunno. Maybe it's because I was just sitting here reading Ian Stewart's chapter on Sally Clark and pondering probability, but I rather suspect that the probability that you're over 50 and suck is much higher than the probability that you are over 50 and are a badass. Mostly because the probability that you suck is incredibly high. And I'm saying this as someone who is over 50, with a phd, a bunch of programming lan…

You never outgrow impostor syndrome! Hang in there, friend. Your coworkers probably don't think you suck.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by daveFNbuck » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #184

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.

I too work in a fortune 500 outside the valley. Occasionally I wonder why we lose so many young coders good and bad to SV. I'll then go check salaries using a job hunting site for the same positions in SV and they pay the same or less after adjusting for cost of living. Is there some magic pool of jobs there that let you retired after 10 years that I am not seeing? I'm coming up on 20 years of writing c++ and I'm not…

In addition to salary, you also have the chance of hitting the jackpot when the startup you work at goes public.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by gedy » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #112

Is it really common to retire at 35? I'd think it would be just a few could afford that. Around here property taxes plus health insurance for a family is $50k/yr. So from 35->65 that is $1.5m. Not including cost of living of course. Maybe the stock market has been way too successful in the last few decades. Ask a European or Japanese person about retiring early and living off the market. (of course many 35 year olds…

Yeah I only hear that from 20 somethings who extrapolate their 401k and salary from past 3-4 years of good gains. It's all they've known.

I used to think that way, but after the two big downturns in 2001 and 2008 I am sadly a lot more realistic now..

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

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Post by pvarangot » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:36 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…

I'm 34, left my 7 years relation two years ago, am gay and never thought I could have kids and am not planning on having kids any time soon. This kind of thinking about that the traits that one develops with age and experience only come about with raising a family kind of worries me, I have a pretty good idea on what I'm missing on since absolutely all my good friends from university and most of my close friends from my past two gigs are raising kids. I just don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it. I also think I can manage time and prioritize better because life did throw stuff at me, just not marriage and children.

Also, if I feel like it, I can work 80 hour weeks. I just need to rest after doing it and can't sustain it for too long. I don't know if I can't sustain it for too long "because of age", or if because of experience I do now realize I'm doing everything wrong because of burnout, and when I was young I just powered through doing wrong shit when I was stressed out or sleep deprived and didn't asses I was doing wrong shit.