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VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

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Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#71

Somewhere out there is a great 30 year old who started working at 18 that this dumb company is missing out on.

I work with a few of them actually. I loved college but these guys were cutting their teeth on tech when I was cutting mine on beer pong. All of them are too smart to ever think about a job description like that.

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#72
post #58

This is going to probably bite me in the ass because I'm looking for work at the moment and occasionally apply to interesting YC companies but since this has come up, I'm going to share my story here because of the negative experience I had with the company in question. I had a phone screen with 500friends recently. They were late calling me, and the person I was scheduled to talk with wasn't even on the call. They h…

Their behavior sounds terrible, but I'd expect any decent programmer to be able to write a linked list or prime number solver.

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#73
What if we gave them the benefit of the doubt, and they were posting "no more than 12 years" because they want someone who's seen what happens but not someone who is steeped in it? Someone who is familiar with the problems but hasn't dealt with it so long that they are still naively excited about trying to change it?

For example, if x guy has been doing TPS reports for 12 years,maybe they are figuring that he has already just adjusted to a gotta-do-my-TPS-reports mindset?

just giving some benefit of the doubt

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#74
post #70

Hey right over here everyone!!! This is called ageism. If you write code and you are over 35, you are toast. Yes even you the "above average coder"...done and done. Now wait till that immigration bill passes, make 150k? GOOD ___ing BYE.

If you write code and you are over 35, you are toast.

In SV, maybe. Hopefully not so much elsewhere or I'm gonna have a hard time paying off my student loans...

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#75
The reason for this is that if you haven't been coding (just managing) for 12+ years...you probably are not "hands-on" enough for a company of our stage.

We have gotten a lot of very smart but "big company" people who had applied for this position.

Sorry for the confusion however, most of our team is actually MUCH holder than the typical start-up: 500friends.com/team. We may be a lot of things but are definitely not ageist.

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#76
it seems to have been removed (the 12 years part) btw.

i saw it earlier. perhaps it was a joke - agile manifesto was published 12 years ago? (an argument for this is that 12 years is a strange number to use otherwise).

[edit] and now there's a broken link on the front page saying that 26% of their team is older than 38. i hate to say it but (1) i told you so (2) do people lose their sense of humour with age? (3) i am 46 myself...

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#77
post #74
post #70

Hey right over here everyone!!! This is called ageism. If you write code and you are over 35, you are toast. Yes even you the "above average coder"...done and done. Now wait till that immigration bill passes, make 150k? GOOD ___ing BYE.

If you write code and you are over 35, you are toast. In SV, maybe. Hopefully not so much elsewhere or I'm gonna have a hard time paying off my student loans...

I hate the fact you have to say that...it pisses me off to hear this. I was lucky I had minimal loans, and school was 1/2 the cost. If I can give a word of advice, spend less on car #1 and attack that loan, pay it off. Get to 0 debt.

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#78
post #68
post #58

This is going to probably bite me in the ass because I'm looking for work at the moment and occasionally apply to interesting YC companies but since this has come up, I'm going to share my story here because of the negative experience I had with the company in question. I had a phone screen with 500friends recently. They were late calling me, and the person I was scheduled to talk with wasn't even on the call. They h…

[deleted]

I believe the person is saying that it is okay to asked linked lists questions, but you must also ask practical questions.

In your case, why not ask about linked lists, and then ask why in a CRUD app the models are ending up in a mixed up state when you add a second application server?

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#79

It actually makes sense. It's not about age. Middle management has an expiration date. If you've been a middle manager for 15 years, that's bad bad bad. (Being an IC for 15 years is respectable; but once you move into management, you should make director in 5 years and VP in no less than 10.) Programming has an ageism problem largely because it's run by career managers (who think all of us want to be them-- and we do…

You can be fairly confident there some startups out there founding by 20 somethings, populated by 20 somethings, who think having someone over 30, or certainly over 40, on their team or even in their office would be akin to the plague. They would probably place them in the same camp as their parents.

I totally understand why coders like Agile, hey I like it because hacking code is the fun part :) Its also kind of a good fit for the app store era, where you throw something out there and see if its sticks before you actually develop most of it. Not entirely sure its actually a good way to develop nontrivial software.

Re: VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

#80
post #77
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write code and you are over 35, you are toast. In SV, maybe. Hopefully not so much elsewhere or I'm gonna have a hard time paying off my student loans...

I hate the fact you have to say that...it pisses me off to hear this. I was lucky I had minimal loans, and school was 1/2 the cost. If I can give a word of advice, spend less on car #1 and attack that loan, pay it off. Get to 0 debt.

Yeah, what can I say? Times are strange, and fatalism leads one to take risks.
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