111–120 of 200 posts
While serious, this is still an accusation, and will be ultimately decided by the courts not EEOC.
Speaking of which, highly relevant: the EEOC just got defanged. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2020/09/08/an-e...
This happens repeatedly and isn't anything new. This happens because there are a bunch of mentally ill people running tech companies that want jobs to be about "belief". They don't want older people in tech because they want to empire build with the latest and greatest insecure technology. They want to create frustration engines with poor engineering practices they older tech workers won't put up with it. The goal is…
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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…
You can do a whiteboard interview without doing leet code. Do an actual coding interview (whether whiteboard or not). Don't do credentials-only. Don't do a lottery. And make sure you don't fall for a BS artist.
But in your coding interview, don't do leet code. Just give a regular coding problem. Not a big one, not a long one, not an especially tricky one. Then watch them code, and listen. (Ask them to think out loud - it's important to understand how they think.) That's all it takes.
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…
Sounds like you're claiming there is less discrimination at startups?
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've just had people from other departments compliment me on this new hire's first ticket. Had to check for sarcasm, but they were genuinely SO happy they sought me out to tell me what a great job he did.
The ticket was simple, the programming trivial and could have been done by a fresh grad (everyone's first ticket is deliberately simple so they can concentrate on the process and how to build and test and everything else), but the way he handled all the stakeholders and went beyond the bare ticket betrayed decades of experience. Like some kind of holistic software engineer.
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…
This is the thing that confuses me a little, fresh blood is important too but having people who've gone round the block a few times (especially somewhere else) can be very helpful even just as a second pair of eyes.
I worked with a younger guy, very capable dude, but our differences in ability to talk to a customer and sort of shake out what they really want / need were like night and day.
But that's what working on a team is, I'd step in and help everyone take a step back and realize what we're all doing / can do for them and get back on track / save everyone weeks of trial and error. He'd show me some stuff too that I wasn't good at.
Good combo.
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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…
My first job out of school was as a startup founder (10% ownership) where our new CEO was a sales guy from a healthcare company. Great at raising money, but no deep technical knowledge. We were building a music search recommender using mfcc spectrograms and ML. He decided to fire all the engineers and hire out to cheap overseas hotspot. We weren't especially expensive, being young guys, but nevertheless you could get 3 for 1 overseas...
The company shut down a few months after the local engineers left.
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What would happen if you lied about your age (eliminate the first 10 years from your resume), both at the time of applying for the job and after joining the company? How much trouble can you get in for that? It doesn't seem unethical at all.
The one problem might be education on your resume. People can infer age from that generally. If you leave dates off it might also be seen that you are hiding the dates because of your age.
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 am months from being 50 and I am a cloud architect/eng/admin. I am a former Microsoft MVP (rMVP) in System Center, I have co-authored books on the subject, spoke at conferences, blah, blah, I was a pretty big deal in the space, so much so that competitors would routinely try to hire me. I can still recall the moment when I thought 'I need to get out of this space and into cloud' At the time I was part of a sales te…
Programmers are not like this and are generally quite excited to be working with something new, then and now.