How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#461

Post by aklemm » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 4:31 AM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #260

rayiner wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers are part of society and have to accommodate peoples' human functions. Requiring employers to make bathrooms available and giving bathroom breaks is reasonable, as is requiring employers to provide say parental leave (even if childless people can't use it). Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing--expecting people to regularly be in the office after typical daycare…

> requiring employers to provide say parental leave You pivoted into govt laws on employers. That is not what we are discussing here though, I was referring to "values" that employers come up with voluntarily. I don't have any issues with clearly laid out govt policies. > Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing I don't disagree with this as long as everyone can use this flex…

Raising children is a service to society. That doesn't mean the childless should be discriminated against, but it does mean families should be accommodated. Giving a parent more flexibility than a non-parent is not discrimination, it is accommodation, and it's for the good of us all. The childless clearly benefit from healthy families.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#462

Post by solveit » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 4:37 AM UTC

rapind wrote: post #448

solveit wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, between legacy software (powering expensive and irreplaceable legacy hardware), and a userbase that doesn't care so much about learning the fancy newer tools as long as they can do their experiments, I think it's still standard in many parts of physics.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#463

Post by pedrosorio » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 4:55 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #372

pedrosorio wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only 16% of adults nationwide live with a roommate or other non-relative, and that number is declining since 1995: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/31/more-adults-... .

You stated: “People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably.”

This is false for software engineers in the Bay Area. Can they save more by living with roommates? Sure.

But they wouldn’t be “financially distressed” or “unable to save money comfortably” if they didn’t - that is easily verified by looking up new grad salaries and rents in the Bay Area.

It’s simply a rational decision - these are people who were living with roommates in college and by continuing that arrangement can save more, live in a better location w/ more amenities, and quite often share a place with friends - win/win/win.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#464

Post by mycall » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 5:31 AM UTC

edoceo wrote: post #432

greglindahl wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gig to hire doesn't work if the job market is hot enough that potential employees have full-time job offers in addition to your gig-to-hire offer. I've been able to gig-to-hire for offshore developers, but never for onshore.

Got my most recent two employees this way, one sales, one dev, both had prior employment, I'm in Seattle

What's the difference between "gig to hire" and "6 month contract" then hire if you like them?

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#465

Post by mycall » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 5:53 AM UTC

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…

Funny note: the original paper for Waterfall had many agile concepts built into it, if you read more than the first page.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#466

Post by world32 » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 5:58 AM UTC

mycall wrote: post #464

edoceo wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got my most recent two employees this way, one sales, one dev, both had prior employment, I'm in Seattle

What's the difference between "gig to hire" and "6 month contract" then hire if you like them?

I don't know about Silicon Valley but in the UK with contractor rates being what they are, the employee will likely make a hell of a lot more money while on that 6 month contract then they will when they get hired permanently. So it may seem to the employee like they are taking a giant pay cut in order to have a perm position.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#467

Post by world32 » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 6:02 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #426

dmoy wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code despite the fact that I told them well in advance that I have never worked with Ruby. Were you applying to a place that writes a ton of Ruby?

Yes. And I told them up front, during the phone screen, that I had never written a single line of Ruby code, and they said that this was no problem, that they just wanted generally smart people, and that I could climb the Ruby learning curve after I came on board. They specifically told me that all of the coding during the live interview would be in a language of my choice. They even asked me what my preferred enviro…

It sounds like the problem was not your ability to debug ruby code to but your reaction to them asking you to do it. You almost sound outraged that they dared to ask you to debug some ruby code. A better candidate would have just calmly proceeded to have a go at it while explaining their thought processes to the interviewer, even if they had never coded in ruby or whatever language.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#468

Post by lisper » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

world32 wrote: post #467

lisper wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And I told them up front, during the phone screen, that I had never written a single line of Ruby code, and they said that this was no problem, that they just wanted generally smart people, and that I could climb the Ruby learning curve after I came on board. They specifically told me that all of the coding during the live interview would be in a language of my choice. They even asked me what my preferred enviro…

It sounds like the problem was not your ability to debug ruby code to but your reaction to them asking you to do it. You almost sound outraged that they dared to ask you to debug some ruby code. A better candidate would have just calmly proceeded to have a go at it while explaining their thought processes to the interviewer, even if they had never coded in ruby or whatever language.

"Outraged" is overstating it, but yes, I was pretty annoyed, but not because they asked me to debug Ruby code. I was annoyed because they lied to me. If they'd just been up front and told me they really were just looking for Ruby programmers I could have told them sorry, I am not your man, and saved everyone a lot of time.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#469

Post by mikekchar » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 7:05 AM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #157

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…

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…

And sometimes (equally ...gasp..) because you just want to work on interesting problems with people you like -- and those jobs didn't pay out the big bucks.

It's amazing to me that so many people think that the point of a tech job is to walk away with a boat load of cash.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#470

Post by world32 » Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 8:09 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #468

world32 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the problem was not your ability to debug ruby code to but your reaction to them asking you to do it. You almost sound outraged that they dared to ask you to debug some ruby code. A better candidate would have just calmly proceeded to have a go at it while explaining their thought processes to the interviewer, even if they had never coded in ruby or whatever language.

"Outraged" is overstating it, but yes, I was pretty annoyed, but not because they asked me to debug Ruby code. I was annoyed because they lied to me. If they'd just been up front and told me they really were just looking for Ruby programmers I could have told them sorry, I am not your man, and saved everyone a lot of time.

> I was annoyed because they lied to me.

That's a bit of an overstatement, chances are there was a miscommunication and the person interviewing you did not know that you had been told there would be a know ruby questions. Seriously, its just an interview, they're not going to go out of their way to accomodate your every request, just roll with it. Since you were able to debug the ruby code, its sounds like you could have gotten the job if it wasn't for your attitude. IMO the right attitude is more important than raw technical skill, you might pass the "Can he code in ruby?" part of the interview, but fail the "Can he handle things not going his way?" part.

I recently had an interview for a developer job where I was asked lots of devops questions, even though it wasn't a devops-heavy role and I don't have much devops experience listed on my CV. I wasn't able to answer many of the questions but I drew on what little knowledge I did have to try and come up with answers. In the end I got the job because the interviewer said he appreciated how I tried to reason out answers to his questions even without much knowledge in the area. If I would have gotten all annoyed and started acting like I was being lied to and cheated then I doubt I would have gotten the job.