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Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
161–170 of 219 posts
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, I mean I've interviewed lots of just absolutely terrible candidates of all ages. Part of the problem seems to be that perception of this group is based on a narrative about their age in the first place. (Not to mention, you meet someone for an hour, what do you really know about them? You can evaluate them for a job, but why are we spinning yarns about their internal motivations?)
> ve interviewed lots of just absolutely terrible candidates of all ages Yes, absolutely. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But when a younger candidate gets declined, they don't shake their fist and blame ageism.
No, they shake their fist and blame "nobody wants to hire juniors and train them any more, everyone just wants to hire seniors!"
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
My entire formal education and subsequent career stands in opposition to this statement. Unless you mean that learning requires being lied to more than 20% of the time.
That sounds like exaggeration to me, in service of a bias against "formal education". But OK. YMMV. My statement applies only to the experience of working with the things, and relates not at all to "formal education". If I have to learn the subject to debug what they're putting out, then the rate-limiting step of using them is...learning the subject. Same as it ever was. Having a stochastic parrot spit a stream of 20…
I actually think the time I spent in school was valuable and that formal education gets a bad rap around here. I believe that my teachers all had good intentions. But they weren't always right. In my experience nobody is right 80% of the time.
I'm skeptical of the AI hype but I do believe there is value. Similar to self driving cars an AI assistant or teacher doesn't have to be right all the time, it only has to be right more often. Proper use of this tool will require skillbuilding like anything else.
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#164Text-only, no Javascript, works where archive.is is blocked:
x=https://www.wired.com/story/ageism-haunts-tech-workers-layoffs-race-to-get-hired/
busybox wget -U "" -qO/dev/stdout $x \
|tr \/p;
2,/#main-content/d;
/./{
/dfABRF/,//{//>/p;//>/p;//p;
/span class=.lead/,//p;
}' \
|uniq > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#165I know a lot of people who has zero trouble getting hired for a whole career suddenly start having trouble in their 40s.
In my 40s I started getting turned down (for the first time ever!) for the weirdest reasons. "Wouldn't be able to handle working with uncooperative teams within the company." (Whaaa...? Dodged a bullet there.) "Not passionate about programming." (Did you not look at my resume? My books I wrote to give away?) Are these _really_ the reasons?
And you do notice it when everyone interviewing you is under 30. Not that being under 30 is bad, but a diverse workplace is a plus in my mind.
A friend of mine started dyeing his hair and landed a job soon thereafter, after over a year of looking. If I were going on the hunt again, I'd definitely do that. My face looks younger than it is. But what a bullshit thing to have to do. (I can hear all the women here saying, "oh you poor thing how will you survive". Yes, yes, I know. It's bullshit all around.)
Now I'm in academia for semi-retirement, which is what I really love anyway, where experience has value that remains undiminished by age. :)
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#166On the flip side, when none of the kids know C any longer, you can hire me out of retirement at phenomenal expense to help maintain your legacy code. :)
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#167When I was coming up a long while back, there were exciting employers that filled their ranks with ambitious recent grads and lavished them with ping pong tables and soda fountains in the "war room" full of knock-off Aeron chairs and various configurations of conference tables. We'd work crazy hours and move fast with tools we didn't really understand. Most of us would get laid off multiple times as the companies we…
The difference in comp can be substantial. If we’re talking about FAANG tier or similar, then a junior FAANG engineer can be making as much as an enterprise company staff engineer with decades of experience about to retire in their 60s. Even if we’re not talking about FAANG tier, interviewing around I’ve been given offers at tech companies that were up to 1.5x my enterprise senior SWE comp. Work life balance is gambl…
Usually the cheaper the pay, the worse the death marches are. The company is either struggling to make a profit, or the managers are too greedy and saving up to buy a beach front mansion at your expense.
A higher pay rate means the company is profitable enough to spread the profits around. It may not last forever, but it's good while it's there.
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
so web apps are sexy and cutting edge, while sensor fusion is boring and stale? I'm not a defense contractor, but that take just seems wild. most of SV isn't cutting-edge tech. most SV devs are generalists.
Apparently. Why else were companies scooping up bootcamp grads for 200k+ to make yet another CRUD app? They clearly feel that investment will be worth it. Compensation of course isn't the best factor for determining cutting edge. Defense contractors for instance, can work on some truly novel tech but salaries in government has hard caps. But it is telling of something when the above scenario was true not too long ago…
Yeah, I dropped my /s. Too many years of watching people do embedded, RF, flight control systems and whatnot for 20 years for half what FAANG was throwing at recent grads. Not that there isn't some truly inspiring engineering happening there, though IIRC correctly the people who first built that stuff weren't exactly spring chickens.
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like exaggeration to me, in service of a bias against "formal education". But OK. YMMV. My statement applies only to the experience of working with the things, and relates not at all to "formal education". If I have to learn the subject to debug what they're putting out, then the rate-limiting step of using them is...learning the subject. Same as it ever was. Having a stochastic parrot spit a stream of 20…
I actually think the time I spent in school was valuable and that formal education gets a bad rap around here. I believe that my teachers all had good intentions. But they weren't always right. In my experience nobody is right 80% of the time. I'm skeptical of the AI hype but I do believe there is value. Similar to self driving cars an AI assistant or teacher doesn't have to be right all the time, it only has to be r…
Oh, I'm not saying there's no value, just that I don't think the value is nearly the magnitude being hyped, and certainly not for the "speeding up the junior to senior transition" posited by the comment at the top of the thread. And sure, every teacher is wrong at some rate -- but the way we deal with that is by thinking for ourselves, asking lots of teachers, working out the differences, etc. This inherently takes time.
Pick some domain that you know nothing about, and ask a transformer model to solve a known problem in the space. It will give you a reply. Is the reply correct? Assuming that you even know how to ask the right question to get a sensible answer (which itself requires expertise), assessing the quality of the answer certainly requires expertise that you don't have. So either you figure it out for yourself (as slow as learning from any other source), or you take it on blind faith.
If I had to wager on the area where I think these models are going to lead to big changes, it's reading and summarization, not generation. "Describe how node deletion in b-trees works in 500 words" is a heck of a lot more useful than asking a transformer to write code to implement node deletion in a b-tree.
Re: Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI won't be as impactful in generating good results (though it may result in middle management firing devs/admins since they think they're easily replaceable). As an example, I asked claude.ai to generate an ansible playbook for patching a Docker cluster. It created one, something I'd expect a junior admin to be able to whip up pretty easily. Then I noticed something funky. The playbook was OS agnostic, just using so…
Because it wrote 90% of the code and you had two quick things to inspect and fix? Sounds like a healthy tradeoff to me.
It wrote a template that passed a playbook linter. Whether any of the tasks were actually correct is highly questionable. I caught the errors because I have lots of experience. Maybe we need an AI to double check the work of the first AI?
/s