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How the Valley treats experienced people

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#361

Post by closeparen »

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.

Private, quiet space is a visceral need for some people and a frivolous luxury for others. In my experience it's very difficult for the people in these two groups to understand each other. A craving for solitude is an expensive trait, but one I have no qualms about indulging: after spending all day in a giant open floorplan and then commuting on a crush-loaded train, if there were Craigslist strangers in my home I'd be in hell.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#362

Post by codinger »

I think this line of thinking is fallacious on the premise that the industry is growing at such a fast rate the next generation of engineers and developers is exponentially larger than the previous creating this illusion that most of the older folks must have retired by their 30s or 40s.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#363

Post by mixmastamyk »

hawaiianbrah wrote: post #294
WalterBright wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Internet is typically spotty, slow, and expensive on cruises. May be an opportunity for improvement.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#365

Post by christophilus »

ghaff wrote: post #106
christophilus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time. 3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry. The longest I’ve ever held a job is just barely 5 years. Most tech employers— at least the smart ones— know the average bounce rate in the industry is high. Older employees tend to value stability, for various reasons. So I don’t buy your argument. If there’s a reluctance t…

>3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry. That's a rather SV-centric view. Otherwise 5-10 years (or longer) is quite normal, including in tech. At many companies, a bunch of 3 year stints for a job candidate is something of a red flag.

I’ve never worked in SV. Only small enterprises, Microsoft, a handful of local startups, and one SV company. The SV company had above average retention compared to most of the non SV places I’ve worked. The 3 year range has been pretty much the norm in my experience (20 years or so). 5 years has been on the high end in every company I’ve worked for. It is anecdotal, but it is what I’ve seen consistently across markets both large and small.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#366

Post by mixmastamyk »

rak00n wrote: post #360
mixmastamyk wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, see sibling comment.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#367

Post by mixmastamyk »

CydeWeys wrote: post #343
mixmastamyk wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like the broker had to sell everything because you went below your required margin ratio. A typical margin ratio is 50%, and AAPL collapsed by more than 50% during the 2008 meltdown, so it sounds like you got margin called. If that is indeed what happened then that's on you for buying on margin (which is inherently riskier), and no fault of the broker. If that's not what happened, and the broker executed trade…

Yes, even when making the right (though unnecessarily risky) call an unrelated third party can still show up out of the blue and ruin everything. There are more failure modes to luck than are commonly understood.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#368

Post by pedrosorio »

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.

I feel like this is one of those "filter bubble" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble) scenarios.

There are many young software engineers working at Google/Facebook who would be able to save significantly more than the median US household income per year while renting their own place but still choose to live with roommates.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#369

Post by jwr »

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…

Additionally, people over 35 start gaining a better perspective on systems. It's not just experience, your brain actually changes and you see things differently. So, while you might not switch windows or pump out lines of code as quickly as a younger person, you might be able to design better systems and write less code overall, because you will know what is really necessary.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#370

Post by nobleach »

markbnj wrote: post #334

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 fa…

From a point of view, I might even agree with Zuck's asinine statement. When I was in my 20's, I had no idea how many things I truly did not know. So, in my limited "fresh out of college" way, I was pushing maximum intelligence. As the years have flown by, I've learned just how vast many fields are. Introspectively, I've learned that I'm not the brightest mind in any given room. As a matter of fact, I've just barely scratched the surface. Many, as they get older, realize this harsh reality. For me, I was probably very smart... and completely ignorant. In tech, this is inflated as we seem to rediscover old paradigms every few years, yet we look at those that may have lived through an earlier "discovery" as "irrelevant geezers". Many of could never dream to achieve the level of things that Alan Kay has forgotten, but we sure will treat his contemporaries as worthless. Zuck will get there some day. And I doubt history will remember his as a great visionary.
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