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How the Valley treats experienced people

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#351

Post by humanrebar »

user5994461 wrote: post #276
humanrebar wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it difficult to hire senior developers for junior positions with the salary that goes with it. Make the offer. If they turn it down, let them know they can change their minds later. I always tell engineers looking for jobs that saying "no" is the employer's job. It goes the other way too. Offer the engineer the associate engineer job (or whatever the title is). Let them counteroffer or decide it's a bad fit.

I find it difficult to handle in practice. That requires to adjust the interview and the rating, to conclude that the guy should join as a junior, instead of being rejected. But there is no shortage of new graduates and juniors with too little experience. What if the company already stopped hiring juniors because they are too many and there are not enough senior to train them? We have no job to offer at that level, i…

I recommend it at least once a month. I don't know why copying the candidate info to another req should be difficult compared to the rest of the interview and recruiting process.

If you don't have junior level openings, don't offer the job, clearly.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#352

Post by TomVDB »

rayiner wrote: post #304
dnautics wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you don't understand the math here. If you are in your 20s, single, and making six figures, you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent and it's quite nice because you have so much extra capital to spend on top of saving. And there are things to spend it on here. Heck many in their thirties do this.

> you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent Working a 60 hour/week professional job to live like a 1890s garment factory worker sounds... unappealing.

I lived with roommates until 30. It was fun, it was cheap, and I was able to save a ton in a very short time which allowed me to have a sizable down payment on a house.

Nothing like a garment factory worker.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#353

Post by mixmastamyk »

Kalium wrote: post #321
brian_cunnie wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1…

I specialize in modern Python and to some extent JavaScript. Necessary but not nearly sufficient to get hired these days.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#354

Post by CydeWeys »

mbrumlow wrote: post #246
dnautics wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you don't understand the math here. If you are in your 20s, single, and making six figures, you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent and it's quite nice because you have so much extra capital to spend on top of saving. And there are things to spend it on here. Heck many in their thirties do this.

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…

> Meanwhile in the south you can make those same six figures

This isn't true in the slightest. You can easily make double or more in a top tier tech city like SF/SV as you can in the south. My salary is about 7X higher than when I first started in tech over a decade ago at a smaller IT consulting firm (and note that my starting salary was decent for the area, not horribly low-balled). There's no way that would have happened had I stayed where I was instead of moving to a top tier tech city offering the highest salaries.

I'm saving twice as much per year as the average developer in the country makes. That's definitely not possible in the south.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#355

Post by paulie_a »

gaius wrote: post #268
paulie_a wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't discriminate on age but realistically someone is not senior until they have 10 years experience. That generally puts them in their 30s. The younger ones can overwork themselves, job hop, write bad code. And then an experienced coder can sigh and fix it.

You can have a senior programmer in their 30s and a junior programmer in their 50s, if the latter is a career-changer fresh out of a coding bootcamp, or with a couple of MOOCs under their belt. Age is often correlated with seniority, but correlation is not causation...

I understand. But typically some one out of college or took a boot camp even needs that amount of time so many are in their 30s. The 50 year is a rarer case.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#356

Post by rayiner »

dnautics wrote: post #347
rayiner wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent Working a 60 hour/week professional job to live like a 1890s garment factory worker sounds... unappealing.

In your 20s? Who cares. Living with others can be fun. And those 1.5k in rent places are quite nice, they're just not spacious.

Almost nobody who can afford it chooses to live with roommates after college. People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably. Professionals do it in cities like San Francisco and New York because early-career professionals in those cities are financially distressed relative to property owners in those cities.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#357

Post by cgh »

shmat wrote: post #87
xuki wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't beat yourself up, hindsight is 20/20.

The only one I beat myself up over is hanging on to options too long, since that was greed. The other decisions were all reasonable given what I knew at the time.

If it makes you feel any better, I did exactly the same thing: failed to exercise my options, lost out on six figures. Not the hugest payday but it would have been life-changing at the time. Such is life.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#358

Post by euvitudo »

shmat wrote: post #203
curun1r wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, sometimes you don't make enough for early retirement because...gasp...you don't prioritize money over everything else. Some of us have tried to use our talents to do things that are socially responsible. Whether it's doing something in the non-profit space, working on a company that targets the underprivileged, something to do with the environment or anything along those lines, not everyone is comfortable invad…

Good for you. We need more people to work on these kinds of problems. I admit that I was not altruistic. In my defense, I've given a lot to charities over the decades.

One thing I learned being a band parent is that the parent's direct involvement during events (being there in person) is much more valuable and appreciated than any money given.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#359

Post by dnautics »

rayiner wrote: post #356
dnautics wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your 20s? Who cares. Living with others can be fun. And those 1.5k in rent places are quite nice, they're just not spacious.

Almost nobody who can afford it chooses to live with roommates after college. People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably. Professionals do it in cities like San Francisco and New York because early-career professionals in those cities are financially distressed relative to property owners in those cities.

just a reminder:

https://newrepublic.com/article/113176/science-loneliness-ho...

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#360

Post by rak00n »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #330
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.

I learned something new. A broker can sell your stock without your consent?
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