91–100 of 200 posts
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The incentive structure of unregulated capitalism is "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs." The things to extract value from: employees, environment, government policy, tax code, if I was smarter I'd think of a few others.
"Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs" is also the incentive structure of workers.
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> cheaper, contractor rates. Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite - that's why so many positions are "contract to hire". They'd rather have a perm employee, but they want to deal with contracting for a few months just to be on the safe side.
Roles I've seen pay the same, but FTs benefits of healthcare/401k/vacation are worth 50k/yr.
https://beebole.com/blog/how-to-calculate-the-real-cost-of-a...
>...the real salary of an employee ends up “being 18% to 26% more than a worker’s base salary.
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Not exactly, but ageism is probably a welcome externality. The value of leetcode is mostly in helping hiring-people wash their hands of some responsibility.
Another externality - if not an intended effect - is that it selects for people who are willing to accept an abusive relationship with their employer. Why do I call it abusive? "Study this stuff, that isn't actually related to your job, on your own time, for free, for months, and we might give you a job." Even if you do get a job, they still abused you.
Those are your three alternatives to the whiteboard interview.
Which would you prefer? (I'm perfectly willing to admit I've missed one[1], but it's probably a subset of these three.)
[1] Life-long German apprenticeship/Japanese salaryman arrangements don't work in the fast rise/fast fall tech environment. Also, Japanese salaryman culture is horrific.
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The math is simple: Replace a senior salary with 2 H1Bs for (hopefully) 1.5x productivity. 2 weeks vacation, no family, and no health issues makes for the ideal servant.
Yeah this is it in my experience. It looks like they're optimizing for age, but they're really optimizing for cost and ageism is a side-effect. I've seen this happen at almost every job I've had: Senior engineer with 10+ years experience works 40-50 hours a week and gets laid off. Senior engineer is opinionated about how things are implemented and can come across as "difficult." Two junior engineers are hired for abo…
The “lord of flies” cultures these teams become can be astoundingly horrible and toxic. Imagine a lot inexperienced people trying to one up each other, no one providing any direction whatsoever. I happily left one such team not long ago!
I'm not surprised. A few years back IBM started a "back to the lab" initiative to dissuade workers from working remotely. Workers that were unable to commute to a physical office were forced to leave the company. My impression is that this disproportionately affected older workers. It seemed like soon after the dust had settled they no longer enforced the requirement. Note, this was after I left the company, so it's…
I was at IBM during this time. As a consultant, my boss fought to keep us remote.
In some cases people were told to go back to the office but physically couldn't unless they packed up and moved. They were hired remote, so they lived in an area that had no office.
Median age at Facebook is 28? Wow. https://www.businessinsider.com/median-tech-employee-age-cha...
It's interesting to me that Netflix isn't on that list. Maybe because it ruins their stats. Totally anecdotal but I wouldn't be surprised if it were up there in the mid-high 30s. I'm having trouble thinking of anyone I knew there under 30 that wasn't in HR, recruiting, support, or facilities. There were just a few engineers under 30, and definitely a bunch over 50. And of course management was almost all 35+.
They were only hiring seniors and higher, and it was very explicit on their end, not just that i looked at them during a time period when they have already filled all of their entry-level roles. I just googled and verified that, sounds like it still holds.
With that in mind, of course they will skew higher, since they don't hire any new grads.
The big tech giants have used this marketing ploy that "older workers don't understand new tech" to undercut them at almost every opportunity. I honestly have no idea why they are allowed to get away with this in the media and public opinion. Maybe because older people don't know new tech, so they think older programmers don't know it either? It's insane to me that an older programmer with decades of experience and m…
I also see a lot of resistance when I go to customers for cloud migrations, the IT teams will lie to me or withhold information, some even refuse to attend meetings. Which leaves me in a very awkward position because I know the project sponsor, typically a VP or Cxx, who is paying $300/hr for my time but I don't want to say anything bc I know the IT ppl are just afraid they are going to be seen as irrelevant and lose their job, as much as that isn't usually the case, if I say something about the resistance it could be a resume generating event for them. My point being they don't want to embrace the technical direction the company is headed too. The younger ppl in IT don't typically react this way and often times want to spend as much time learning from as they can and have some previous experience with cloud.
My real point being that I can point to several customers ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand where the 'old guard' doesn't want to get with the new technical direction or does their best to drag their feet doing so. It's too bad, there is a ton of tribal knowledge that can be lost - or hidden - in these situations, and years of experience that still applies to cloud that is lost too.
A fellow older classmate of mine and I were looking for work after changing careers. We were talking about his recent interview when he got a call from the recruiter and put her on speakerphone. She told them they were going with someone else because they thought the other person "fit the culture" better. He asked if she could give some feedback on what that meant and she flat out said "Some people thought you were t…
We tell tradespeople who are 40 years old to hit a bootcamp and get work in our magical software industry. Then, when those same people come to us to be hired our recruiting manager says stuff like "well... they're 40, but have only got 6 months of experience; we can't hire them as a new recruit, but they also don't have enough experience to hire as a senior developer — guess we can't hire them". It's disgusting. Hir…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another externality - if not an intended effect - is that it selects for people who are willing to accept an abusive relationship with their employer. Why do I call it abusive? "Study this stuff, that isn't actually related to your job, on your own time, for free, for months, and we might give you a job." Even if you do get a job, they still abused you.
Would you prefer a system of strict credentialism, a system of lotteries, or a system that optimizes for hiring the most eloquent bullshit artists, instead? Those are your three alternatives to the whiteboard interview. Which would you prefer? (I'm perfectly willing to admit I've missed one[1], but it's probably a subset of these three.) [1] Life-long German apprenticeship/Japanese salaryman arrangements don't work i…
Doctors don’t have to relearn everything on the boards every time they talk to a new job, and that definitely helps combat ageism in that field.