Sailing the world sounds boring. It's too passive. I'll be working creating new things until they carry me out in a box. I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work. I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoye…
> I'll be working creating new things until they carry me out in a box.
> I just don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it. In my experience there are two kinds of pre-kid people: those who aren't ready for it and those who lie about being ready for it.
Irritating attitude and assumptions. Even the wording of "being ready for it" is ignorant. There are many, many successful people who do not have or do not want or will not ever want children.
Like myself, I consider such folks not "pre-kid" but simply "no-kid".
Because not everybody is "pre-kid" by virtue of not wanting kids in the first place.
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…
A lot of the best programmers I know are older than me, and I'm 38.
I kind of feel like the author is referring to Zuckerberg's famous comment about young people being smarter. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was suitably shocking and stupid so it's a candidate anyway. The thing I like about Rachel's take on this is that she gets right to the key thing: regardless of what field you're in, or how you spend your time, the vast majority of us are going to be neither horrible failures nor amazing successes. We're far more likely to just be ordinary human beings, who probably need to earn a living and have something useful to do every day. Fwiw I'm 58 and a working site reliability engineer and developer. I don't really live paycheck to paycheck, but neither can I just quit working and go instagramming about the globe. I'm fortunate to work for a very diverse company that values everyone for what they can contribute, but I am also cognizant of the people who will look at me and wonder why the greybeard never "made it." Those people probably won't "make it" either, and anyway, nobody seems to wonder why the old Italian guy in the town next to us still gets up every day and fixes shoes.
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…
I'm straight and similarly aged. don't worry about expectations, but if you do, at least keep in mind you're not alone! it's enough work to make things work for yourself, let alone worry about how the rest of the world does it...
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…
Sure. And they are great in their area of expertise and able to learn new areas too. When they are changing to slightly new area, they look less like wizards unless given benefit of doubt.
But also, they tend to be less of talkers and presenters which is another separate skill. As in, they are rarely public face.
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.
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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…
Your fortune 500 company pays $250-400k total compensation to young coders (2-9 yrs experience)? Which company is it? You don't? Then you're not paying more or less the same...
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 respec…
> We hired him anyways to get favor with his family, figured we would churn him out and keep everyone happy.
If you don't mind my asking, which country were/are you located in and what line of business were/are you working in?
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…
That bit on the VAX is... interesting. It's been a while, and it was a lot more about hard partitioning, but it makes sense.
I see the parallels in the way jobs are scheduled on the cluster rather than an individual node, storage is common across the cluster, nodes and leave and join hot, the manageability of it all... all seems very familiar!