How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#321

Post by Kalium » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

brian_cunnie wrote: post #180

zik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

> 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.

This is one that a lot of people have trouble with. One of the best engineers I ever worked with was in his 60s at the time, and seems to have stopped learning new organizational systems sometime in the 1980s. Agile development processes were just newfangled bullshit to him.

He was hot shit at anything that required fine attention to detail, and implemented a distributed task system after I gave him a verbal thumbnail sketch. Correctly. The first time.

But I could see that his refusal to learn new things was interfering with his career all the same.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#322

Post by joshuamorton » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #305

joshuamorton wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're talking about a home, 200k in the bay is more than 50k almost anywhere else. There are very few things that cost 4x more on regional differences, and housing may actually be the only one. (Other major expenses, like food, transit/gas, and leisure activities like travel or vacations are much less price elastic, 0-30% more)

But it would be irresponsible to take advantage of any of that, because one needs every last dollar saved towards housing.

Not really. 200k is a down payment on a million dollar home. Double that is a 2 million dollar home, which will let you buy in most places.

Thats achievable in 5 years for someone who is working towards that goal specifically, less if you have a partner who also works. Anecdotally, I know two couples (out of not many total) that purchased within 2 years of moving to the bay. One had some savings, and that plus the first years stock vests was enough for a down payment on a condo. The other took ~2 years to buy a home from very little prior savings, which was possible because both had decent incomes.

So I'm dubious as to the doom and gloom, at least for married professionals.

(Of course, this ignores the reality that for anyone not working in tech or 1-2 other fields, these are wholly out of the picture, and that's hugely problematic! But for the calculation of CoL for someone who is picking between tech companies, I think people overestimate the costs of the bay, and I'm not really sure why)

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#323

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #289

rayiner wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds discriminatory against ppl who don't have kids and are over 40. The economy ceases to exist if, in the long run, couples don't have at least 2.1 kids on average. People are free to not have kids, of course, but having them serves an essential social function and it's not "discriminatory" to have values that accommodate that.

Accommodating employees with kids is great. Discriminating against people who don't have kids is wrong, and illegal. For what it's worth, the first 2 startups I was a founder of in Silicon Valley had a bunch of founders with kids.

[deleted]

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#324

Post by ethagnawl » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #264

kiriakasis wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have misunderstood the suggestion. Giving people enough time to manage a family is different from giving more time to people who have families. An employer might prefer having employees with children for a variety of reason and mostly would treat "family benefits" as method to hire older more experienced people.

> An employer might prefer having employees with children Isn't this straight up illegal? Only straight ppl can have children, for example.

> Only straight ppl can have children, for example.

This "example" is demonstrably false.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#325

Post by Spooky23 » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

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...

Those types of risk mitigation strategies are expensive for retail investors, and in general complexity is your enemy as you age.

We think about market risk and forget about the downside risk imposed by neglect, fraud and incompetence.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#326

Post by grogenaut » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #313

mbrumlow wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in the south you can make those same six figures and have a 5 bedroom house with a mortgage of 1.5k Or live in a nice area for 800 a month. Or live in a shit area for 400. SV math does not work out. You are taxed to much. Pay to high rent and have the pleasure of needing a shit map to walk in your city. I keep seeing this same argument about getting to pay 1.5k to live with a bunch of other people to save s…

Very few people in the South are making 6 figs out of college, even fewer are able to save six figures a year out of college. People in the bay can do that. And that assumes you want a 5 bedroom house, I have zero interest in that right now. Too much space to take care of. Why would I do that? And why would I go somewhere with fewer things to do. I attend social events 2-3 times a week. I've checked elsewhere, that w…

What social events do you enjoy that you don’t classify as hobbies? Eg what social events does sv have that Atlanta doesn’t? Are you counting tech as all encompassing lifestyle?

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#327

Post by lrem » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #308

galangalalgol wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Is there some magic pool of jobs there that let you retired after 10 years that I am not seeing? Yes there is, actually. It is called "working for one of the big 5 tech companies/or one of the unicorns". 200k+ total comp is the norm for someone with a couple years experience working at one of these places. And god knows how much the people with 10+ years make. A Google L6 (staff engineer) makes something like 450k?

Note that Google (and presumably the others) pay for performance, not tenure. 10 years in you might be L8-9 and earn a million or be L4 and, well, not earn a million ;)

Source: I'm keeping a pace of 1 promo / 2 years in Google. I've seen people going both faster and slower (and some stopping at L4, because why bother).

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#328

Post by jefftk » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:22 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.

For what it's worth, lisper has been on HN for 10+ years, has 30k+ karma, and is clearly not a shill.

(Disclosure: I have a friend at Triplebyte)

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#329

Post by grogenaut » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #309

selectodude wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SV math does not work out Sure it does. For one, they're taking home an extra thousand dollars per week in SV even after all the taxes. Also, they don't have to live in Birmingham, AL or whatever the hell.

There are some attractive things to some people about living in Birmingham, or abouts. Your hell hole is other people's heaven; navigable traffic, lakes galore, proximity to clear, warm, clear oceans. Backyards with trees, playsets, green grass. Warm to hot 10 months of the year.

I would so have a full fab and electronics shop by now if I lived in a place like birmingham.

Last year for thanksgiving we were in Knoxville. Was looking at abandoned warehouses that I could flip. Downtown is tiny but nice and supplemented by the university. I’d have to take up rooting for the vols tho.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#330

Post by mixmastamyk » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

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…

Me too, I went all in on Apple stock when the iPhone was announced, on margin I was so convinced. Sounds great right? Well broker sold everything during the 2008 meltdown and lost everything.