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How the Valley treats experienced people

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Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#441

Post by samstave »

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…

I have the same story - I either joined just too late, left a month too early, didnt exercise, or got robbed by the acquirers.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#442

Post by ianai »

Alex3917 wrote: post #101
ianai wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society in general is pretty hard on older people and it increases with age. Think of the way older women are treated as “grandmas”. They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play.

> Think of the way older women are treated as "grandmas". They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play. The (American) Jewish term of endearment for a female baby is bubbeleh, which translates roughly as "tiny future grandmother." On the surface it might look like shoehorning, but I think it's meant to be aspirational more than limiting. There may (or may not) be something similar at play here.

I had a specific response to the stereotypical grandma role. I heard it somewhere too long ago to justly represent. But I think it was that grandmothers can be treated like revered figures but generally not taken seriously when they voice concerns or opinions. I wish I had a clearer memory of this point of view...

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#443

Post by solveit »

manicdee wrote: post #414
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that this is something Zuckerberg said 12 years ago, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he doesn't think that way anymore. (The benefits of experience!)

Given the wisdom of experience he doesn’t announce that anymore.

Or, you know, being 12 years older and realizing he hasn't turned into a stodgy old man who refuses to use anything but Fortran.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#444

Post by erubin »

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.

yeah i don't agree with this. i live alone and spend about the same or a bit more as my friends who live with roommates. they have nicer apartments generally but it's a choice thing in our city (NYC). this is people in early-mid 20s working at faang/banking/consulting.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#445

Post by WalterBright »

justaaron wrote: post #407
WalterBright wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about the US and being an able-bodied adult.

yeah, I got the part about the American mythological construct of the Meritocracy being deeply ingrained in your brain.

I wake up every morning full of ideas on things to create. Deciding which to do is the problem.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#446

Post by WalterBright »

perfmode wrote: post #23
WalterBright wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about the US and being an able-bodied adult.

The US is one of the least egalitarian of developed nations.

Where else can you go from pauper to billionaire in your twenties?

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#447

Post by slow_donkey »

jondubois wrote: post #223

In my 20s, I used to think like that because that's what I was told by everyone around me. Now I find this idea infuriating. I'm almost 30 now and I've been working insanely hard since before I left school and during university; I've been working at least 70 hours per week for 12 years (40 hours on my startup or corporate contracting day job, 30 hours on a side project). I've had some minor successes but still no big…

If you're optimizing for money, early startups would be the last place I'd look. I'm well aware that I'm making ~60% of a big 4 salary (tc) assuming my options are useless.

Additionally I doubt I'm learning as much technically than if I were to work at a big 4and be exposed to much smarter people.

The benefits of startups tend to incur huge tradeoffs.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#448

Post by rapind »

solveit wrote: post #443
manicdee wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the wisdom of experience he doesn’t announce that anymore.

Or, you know, being 12 years older and realizing he hasn't turned into a stodgy old man who refuses to use anything but Fortran.

Not relevant to the original discussion or your point, but I've heard Fortran is still in use and pretty performant (and readable) for what it's being used.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#449

Post by brett40324 »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #50
tokyodude wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it really depends on lots of factors. My father joined a startup in the late 90s, after 5-6 yrs the company failed. At 60 he was unable to get a new job. I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time. I also know from running my own company with partners back in the mid 90s, we were all early 30s except one partner who was 52ish. When getting health insurance for th…

What's funny is that many young people in the industry now would never think of staying at one place for 3-5 years cause they don't want to invest the time. A neighbor of mine is in his 60s and lost his job the same way. He can run rings around anyone I know but he can't find a job or even get an interview. Bjarne Stroustrup, the C++ creator, wrote a blog post about going for a job interview and being told he "didn't…

Wow, do you have a link to the blog post? Bjarne, if you read his C++ books, is a great technical communicator and author, and his contribution to computer science speaks for itself.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#450

Post by SimonPStevens »

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…

> Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions.

This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.

Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.

Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.

You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.

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