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We Hire Old People

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Re: We Hire Old People

#291

Post by snaidamast »

miketx wrote: post #286
snaidamast wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ccleve... I am now 71 years of age. I retired in 2014 after 42+ years in corporate development. I have developed 3 commercial products in my career and am Still doing development. I have worked through three major eras of computer technologies from mainframes, to LANs, to the Internet. I am also a published technical writer in Europe. Can I get hired today? Not a chance. I took an interview out of curiosity several y…

Very well stated Steve! Excellent read.....and your last two paragraphs are spot on regarding development processes. I started my career as a support engineer, but eventually someone figured out I could talk in front of customers and not screw the pooch, so I became a project manager, and eventually an executive level program manager. One thing I figured out early on was that development processes really haven't chan…

Thank you for the nice review of my post.

I actually had a chance to correspond with Stephen McConnell a number of years ago and asked him why he would adopt Agile when he had spent so many years promoting standard software engineering principals and processes. He replied that was still teaching the same software engineering standards but simply used Agile terminology to keep his business relevant.

Since most of the technical managers didn't know the difference they never knew what was really being taught to them.

Steve

Re: We Hire Old People

#292

Post by snaidamast »

zarkov99 wrote: post #237
gorbachev wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that gets me is the cookie cutter interviewing approach a lot of places do. They ask about specifics, but that's not what is the really valuable stuff. As an example I've worked with so, so many web frameworks over the years, even created one or two of my own (small, limited functionality things). Most of them nobody uses any more, because newer frameworks are just better. But I bet the majority of recruite…

Hang in there. I had to go through the Leetcode ordeal as well and it gets easier. It feels awful at first, but if you stick to it, read through the solutions, make sure you understand them, after 100 problems or so it all starts to come back and it becomes much easier. Its probably not the interview methodology I would use but I can see how efficient it is from the interviewer's POV.

I took a look at this LeetCode stuff on the web site. I reviewed a few of the sample, possible tests and found them utterly ridiculous.

I have never seen a need in my entire career to program anything like these samples were expecting applicants to program.

Re: We Hire Old People

#295

Post by tonySunbelt »

I am a 78 year old contract developer, maintaining/developing a medium size system +- 200 modules. it takes me about 4-5 hours a day which is fine! Experience teaches you to tread carefully with critical systems (and people). There really is no need to work 10-12 hour days! Unless it is an unforeseen disaster this usually means you are not very well organized!

The "bright young things" are busy rewriting this system in mvc c# etc, which I help with in a minor role. This has been going on for 9 years with very little signs of completion! Not only have local developers been involved but also software companies in Russia and India have been involved! Developers have grown old on this project (including me!).

So whatever malaise has hit this project it seems to be international. My background on projects is mainly using the "waterfall" approach. My customers wanted a fixed price and so must have a fixed specification. I however appreciate the agile approach as being more flexible and reactive. But both methods must require users and developers to think through the problem and draw up at least a framework of requirements? This hasn't happened on this project and probably accounts for the slight overrun!

Re: We Hire Old People

#296

Post by labiblio »

aeroclassics wrote: post #277
pengaru wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to count the number of over 50 year olds I crossed paths with while burning the midnight oil Getting Shit Done crunching at the office... The only time those offices had lights on after hours were when the cleaning people occupied them. My assumption has been even after the nest empties these folks have better things to do like relaxing in their preferred home(s), eating their preferred meals, sleeping in th…

You must not be counting where I am! I can assure you that I am the oldest developer in the company, certainly in the US. I have been with my current employer for a bit over 9 years. I have worked many, many days until 2100, 2200, plus weekends. I do what needs to get done. I am 64yo and while it is harder on me to go 70-80 hours/week, than when I was 30, I routinely put in 50-55 hours/week. Companies need to wake up…

Same for me. End of 2008 laid off from systems engineering in global mobile device and services industry. After some consulting work I went back to coding/sw design(which I did from 1983 to 2000) but had always kept up with transitions to web stack and all the current stuff. I’d get oh you haven’t used the exact tools in our tool chain for at least 3 years. Geez, I only had to learn and participate in defining process and tool chain for so many times. Zuckerberg boo!

Re: We Hire Old People

#297

Post by ornornor »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #213
herval wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no - more experienced people have more to _impart_, because they've been there, generally know what to focus on, etc. That doesn't necessarily mean they're eager to just put up with anything or just "play along" most cultures, and IMO that's key to a lot of the disguised ageism in the industry. With experience, you also you bring along your own set of practices and habits accrued through the years, which _may…

I'll go a little further and say that more experienced engineers are just not as likely to put up with bullshit. If you've been in the industry long enough you've seen plenty of it from management, marketing, charismatic startup CEOs, etc. You've seen it lead to death marches, dangerous products, wasted effort, burnout. And you're just more likely to call it out and/or object. Most company cultures just don't like th…

> You've seen it lead to death marches, dangerous products, wasted effort, burnout. And you're just more likely to call it out and/or object.

I’m not 50-60 but so this already. I still haven’t found a way to prevent people from inserting me into these train wreck projects. I call it out, it’s ignored, I’m labeled “not a team player”, and end up on most managers shit list.

Re: We Hire Old People

#298

Post by ornornor »

topkai22 wrote: post #244
api wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this too, and I really wonder why there is such an age bias toward straight out of college kids. Having some is fine but the whole industry seems heavily biased in that direction. I suspect it's rooted in the historic youth of computer aficionados back during the early-mid PC era in the 1970s and 1980s, and a cargo cult idea that youth was the ingredient that made this stuff happen. Instead it was the other…

Part of it is just demographics- there are just massively more people getting trained in CS/programming then they are old timers out there. I graduated a decade and a half ago and the size of the computer science department has tripled. Then there really is a tendancy of software engineers to exit the profession in the 35-45 time frame. I actually ran data from the bureau of labor statistics and found that effect to…

> Then there really is a tendancy of software engineers to exit the profession in the 35-45 time frame.

Where do they go?? I’m tired of the daily BS I have to put up with as a developer but don’t know where else to go. I don’t want to be any kind of manager (double and triple booked meetings aren’t my thing).

Re: We Hire Old People

#299

Post by mriet »

Dhirvish wrote: post #261
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inexperienced people are just cheaper. There are two types of young software companies: - Some companies hire a smaller amount of experienced people who really know what they're doing, know what they're worth, and compensates them appropriately. - Other companies hire a larger amount of bright, motivated young people that don't know how to do anything, trains them up quickly, then tries to milk them for 1-3 years unt…

Right, but what about us 43 year olds in the middle? There's a couple 10s of millions of us. I'm trying to move into the tech field, have a decade of migrating paper documents for law firms into databases & doing other simple ETL, but that is disappearing. I saw it coming years ago and am almost done with my masters in data analytics, but all of those jobs pay $10-20k less than what I was making before. There is no w…

Quick tip: leave Mensa off of your resume.

I skip any resume that I see where someone "brags" about how smart they are -- I care about teamwork and how open to new or different ideas someone is, and both of those are orthogonal axes to "intelligence" in my experience.

It's ludicrous for you not to accept a pay cut if 10-20k given your lack of experience. Get off your high horse!

Re: We Hire Old People

#300

Post by TimothyByrd »

ccleve wrote: post #30

I wrote the ad. Holy cow, I didn't expect to be #1 on Hacker News. Will answer any questions. Here's one you might ask: Why? I'm pushing 60 and I've attempted to interview for developer jobs over the last year. Got nowhere despite 40 years of experience. Getting really, really tired of this industry's attitude toward people like me. Based on questions below, I'll give a bit more. Earlier this year I had a personal re…

Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html :

"Perhaps the reason people have fewer new ideas as they get older [...]"

Adam Grant, "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World", chapter 4 :

"When companies run suggestion boxes, there is evidence that older employees tend to submit more ideas and higher-quality ideas than their younger colleagues, with the most valuable suggestions coming from employees older than fifty-five."

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