How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#291

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #266

user5994461 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being able to have an interview is a red flag. Companies can't tell the age from a resume. If they can, take off the date of birth, remove the year on your degrees and don't list experiences beyond 20 years.

I've been given this advice and I'm skeptical. You can only mask things to a certain degree, it can make you look like you're hiding something (which you are), and the hiring manager will figure it out soon enough in any case. If they really want to age discriminate you're probably better off finding out sooner than later anyway. In any case, later career jobs tend to come from personal networks anyway. My resume was…

It's not hiding anything. A resume is a two pages flyer to advertise your services. It doesn't pretend to accurately represent you as a person or 40 years of accumulated experience.

It's really bad if a resume never pass the first screening, it literally can't get a job. It's not reasonable to blame age for that, interviewers cannot guess the age from just a resume (and if they can they shouldn't let be).

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#292

Post by ArchTypical » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #196

I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code…

> There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else

This looks just like an Ad I see on reddit all over the place.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#293

Post by Raidion » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #24

daenz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Luck is a huge part of success. The sad reality is, no matter how irrational is, people don't want to be around someone who is considered unlucky. Especially at a startup. I don't agree with this at all, but I'm saying it because I don't want to pretend that that psychological influence doesn't exist.

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

I get rid of all the unlucky people by randomly throwing resumes away. /s

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#294

Post by hawaiianbrah » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #14

yodsanklai wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work. You don't have to be idle while you're traveling. I always spend a few hours "working" when I travel. I find it too tiring to be out all day anyway.

I've tried. It doesn't work too well. I'm too used to my big monitor at home, and my build/test farm.

The monitor, okay, but can’t you access your build/test farm remotely?

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#295

Post by sharemywin » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

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 the shame of it all is all that wasted talent being used tricking people to click on more ads.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#296

Post by joshuamorton » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

ikeyany wrote: post #283

burlesona wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the move to the Bay Area with a family in my 30s. It’s not perfect, but we’re saving dramatically more than we could anywhere else. I don’t know how long we’ll stay, but at this rate 5 years would be enough to set us up really well almost anywhere else in the US. I wish I’d gotten into software sooner. If you come out here at 22, live with roommates and stay until you’re 30, you probably take anywhere from $40…

Spending your entire life as a young adult doing that sounds dystopian. May that never become the norm.

Eh it depends, I live with a roommate because I choose to. We're friends, we do things together, it's nice.

I could live without one, my rent would be marginally more, though I'd still probably bank close to the same. But the social aspect is really nice.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#297

Post by taude » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

taude wrote: post #281

sokoloff wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the teams/projects/products I've lead. Nor are they types of questions that even measure for engineer work experience and how they approach solving the types of real world problems that 10 minutes of white boarding a bit counting and funky array manipulations alg won't show. They are questions th…

To clarify about my latest alg test, it's not that these types of problems aren't important to interview, but the candidate could definitely have some input on what they know. For example, if all I've used in my real world professional career are some graphing algs, Dijkstra's variations, and Levenshtein string distance type of stuff, asking me a variation on a bubble sort alg on a New Year's Even line waiting problem out of the blue is going to be brutal and likely not test my real world abilities. You could argue that I could study up on all the old stuff, which I'm doing, but it still feels like a time suck and solidifies that these interviews are skewed to the people who left college more recently.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#298

Post by lisper » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

ArchTypical wrote: post #292

lisper wrote: post #196

I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code…

> There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else This looks just like an Ad I see on reddit all over the place.

FWIW, I'm not affiliated with Triplebyte in any way. I'm just a satisfied user.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#299

Post by drharby » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

The article referenced on this one, regarding company culture, is spot on for my current role and company.

But the author's observation of 'make hay while the sun is out ' is spot on.

Shame on company middle managers perpetuating this mindset, but i cant help think such discriminatiom is a cost optimization habit. How are recruitors punished for categorically dismissing a demographic?

I understand how the company is hurt, but how is the recruitor, the gatekeeper, incentivized to NOT be dismissive?

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#300

Post by Raidion » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 5:54 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…

I don't think it's down to bad luck, but it's the fact that there is an undeniable correlation between being a good dev at a startup and that startup succeeding. It's obviously not the strongest correlation, but it's there. If you have two developers, each about equal, and one was a member of a startup that did well, and one wasn't, it's obvious where the chips are going to fall. I don't think anyone calls that luck, even if they probably should at least be aware it could be bad luck.