101–110 of 121 posts
It is definitely not a secret. Age bias is so obvious that its actually celebrated. Look at this example from Jetbrains Jobs page https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/ We offer: Fascinating work in a friendly, young team
For what it's worth, I'm 31 and read that as "the team hasn't been around very long", not "the team is composed of 20-somethings".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, I'm 31 and read that as "the team hasn't been around very long", not "the team is composed of 20-somethings".
Why would that be worth advertising? "Come join us, we have no idea what we're doing here, but we run a legacy product?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, I'm 31 and read that as "the team hasn't been around very long", not "the team is composed of 20-somethings".
Why would that be worth advertising? "Come join us, we have no idea what we're doing here, but we run a legacy product?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even single people should be thinking through high risk decisions, so I don't really see your point there. A dual income couple has inherently more ability to make higher-risk decisions that have larger expected returns. As for time spent working, I'm a bit skeptical of that. It's not like single people don't have socialization needs that need to be met. My single friends spend a lot of time and effort on dating and…
I think the point is that the decisions aren't as high-risk when you are single and don't have other people to support (especially children). The consequences of failure aren't as high. Instead of being able to share a place with a few people (maybe even sharing a room) and sharing utilities, internet, cable and so on, you are paying significantly more for housing, food, utilities, transportation (bigger car), clothe…
Your roommate isn't going to pay for your food and rent. Your spouse will. Moreover, old married people are much more likely to have assets to draw on if someone is unemployed than single people. And while they may have higher expenses, a lot of those (like child care) disappear when one person is unemployed.
Just looking at my friends, very few of my single friends could tolerate loosing their jobs as well as my married friends. That includes older couples I know with kids.
I'm not "young" anymore and not "old" yet, but I'm quite saddened by this point of view: 'The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”'. Software business seems mostly about exploitation of the naivety of the youngsters and less about software and programming.
To start a "modern" project today, you have to know programming languages, infrastructure, and packaging systems that didn't even exist five years ago. That's the surface-level "technology" they (VCs) mean. VCs don't care about your deep algorithm knowledge or domain experience unless it can accelerate user-facing interfaces to the moon. If you hire people with 30 years experience, do they know what a Gruntfile is? D…
The youngest people are banging out feature #4,501 for the website.
As you get older you should be spending more time experimenting, teaching, mentoring, reviewing and building foundation.
The senior guys are senior not because they've pumped out more features this year, but because they're making all the engineers around them better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Youth also doesn't ask complicated questions, like why is the VC getting 10% and I'm getting 0.05% when I'm doing 10% of the work and the VC 0.05%.
In my mind, fair ownership is proportional to investment risk. Each owner invests some combination of time and capital. I assume you are an employee, so how much risk are you taking on?
That's circular reasoning.
What you have to show is that those who are investing more money are making better decisions. Because we want to protect those who make the best decisions, not simply those who have the most invested.
It seems to me that the article:
(A) is a reasonably correct description of some dysfunctional aspects of the Silicon Valley culture but
(B) omits considerations much more important for the main goal of the Silicon Valley culture or any such activity at all -- business success.
Here I concentrate on this last, business success, i.e., making money with computing, software, and the Internet.
=== New Technologies
In the sense of (A) above, it appears that the article wants to concentrate on "new technologies" by which it likely means, say, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, Objective-C, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, mobile devices, etc.
Two problems:
(a) For a startup seeking the goal of business success, those technologies are mostly just redundant alternative tools from which a given startup need pick only a few.
Sure, a person with more skills with more such tools can be useful quickly in a larger collection of startups by others. So, by concentrating on acquiring skills with so many tools, the person is concentrating on being an employee and at least partly neglecting picking a good project and startup for the real goal of business success.
(b) The "new technologies", when and if really needed for the goal of business success, are not just routine software, and the OP did not explain "new technologies" that are needed or how to acquire them.
=== An Example
For my startup, two weeks a go or so, I got all the production software I planned running.
In writing that software, I decided that my user interface (UI) would be just a simple Web site, not an app, and, for the foundation for the software, selected Windows, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET for developing the Web pages, ADO.NET for interacting with SQL Server, and Visual Basic .NET (VB) for the programming language.
My Web pages are so simple (i) I don't need to write or even read any JavaScript and (ii) even for just my first all English language version, 2+ billion people around the world, eight years old or older, whether they know English or not, should find the site easy to use right away or, in the case of an eight year old without English, soon. So it's all just the simplest HTTP, HTML, and CSS with just some one line text boxes and some links with no pop-ups, pull-downs, or roll-overs. We're talking simple as in "Keep it simple, stupid" (KISS).
My mobile strategy is to have my Web pages quite usable even on nearly any mobile device. E.g., each Web page is just 800 pixels wide with large fonts and high contrast, and a window only 300 pixels wide should be wide enough.
Sure, Python has a lot of software libraries: So, if some such library has some functionality I need that is not in .NET, that I can't find in open source in C# or VB, and that I shouldn't just program myself, then maybe I'll use some Python. Okay. So far, nope.
So far I don't need more of the OP's technologies -- Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, JavaScript, Objective-C, etc. or whatever else the OP had in mind.
So, the OP's view of the role of technologies is not good.
=== New Technology
The OP emphasized "new technology":
Okay, continuing my example, in my startup there is some new technology -- I created it. It's implemented in software, but just as software it is just routine. The most advanced code in the software I wrote is a use of the classic heap data structure as a priority queue.
What's special is what came before the software. And that's not computer science, either.
Instead, my new technology is some applied math I derived, yes, complete with theorems and proofs, based on some advanced prerequisites -- I especially thank A. Kolmogorov and J. von Neumann. Maybe these two guys are "new" to Silicon Valley -- otherwise they go back nearly a century.
The Silicon Valley culture the OP is describing will have a tough time duplicating or equaling my new technology.
So, for new technology, I'm far ahead, not behind.
For the new technology I created, the OP's "The young understand new technologies better than the old do" is exactly backwards.
Net, it appears that the OP believes that the keys to business success are new technologies such as Python. Nope!
Instead, Python is just yet another applications programming language that permits writing routine code and is nothing like a step toward the new technologies important for the goal of business success. Similarly for Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C, C#, VB, etc.
=== Denouement
Why am I picking on Python?
From what I've read, Python, CPython, IronPython, etc. are fine, and some of the libraries are terrific. Okay, so, there is yet another applications programming language: It will likely have a good variety of elementary data types, classes, allocate-free, If-Then-Else, Do-While, Call-Return, call by value, call by reference (likely won't have call by name), file and console reading and writing, access to TCP/IP, some means of exceptional condition handling, e.g., Try-Catch, some facilities for multiple threads and locks, etc. It might be compiled, interpretive, or run on a JVM. Okay.
Once I talked with some of the best technical support people at Andreessen-Horowitz (A16Z). They wanted me to be using Python.
I told them that for my startup I had selected Visual Basic .NET (VB).
The A16Z people thought that VB was a toy (they were thinking about the old version of Visual Basic), and I had to explain that (A) for serious production computing on Windows what is crucial is the .NET Framework; (B) essentially the most important language for such work is C#; (C) the .NET version of Visual Basic is different from C# essentially only in a different flavor of syntactic sugar; and (D) for several reasons I prefer the VB flavor.
The A16Z people missed another crucial point: I started with VB only with my present project. Well, right away, less than a minute, I was able to read and write VB. Then with the syntax lessons from just a few, simple code samples, I could write VB right away -- no delay at all. The language was very much not the challenge.
There was a challenge -- the .NET Framework with however many classes and thousands of Web pages of documentation; for serious production software on Windows, .NET is just crucial. The A16Z people didn't understand that.
C#? The syntax looks a lot like that of C so is familiar enough. Of course, I don't like the C syntax -- never did. Used it? Yes. Liked it? No.
Lesson: Even among the best technical support staff at A16Z, the understanding of "new technology" is not good.
For the business goal, this lesson and that of the OP are essentially inevitable: In anything like the present context, the coveted unicorns are rare and need not fit simplistic patterns. So, much consensus on creating unicorns would contradict that the unicorns are rare.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less. However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the CommodityScrumDrone achieves in three 70-hour weeks. Unless, you know, you orient the entire organization around replaceable, low-skill, "Scrum" compliant engineers and never invest in your peopl…
Could you elaborate on the "Scrum" compliant part? I am not super well versed in software development methodologies but the company I am interning at is using Scrum and I have come to appreciate the fact that it helps me "focus" on something and provide fast iteration for the product. Why is do you think it's bad and what are some alternatives?
These methods take management strategies typically reserved for juniors and the underperforming and try to apply them to everyone. It's awful.
However, "Agile" and "Scrum" seem to mean different things everywhere. Some companies say they "do Scrum" but just mean that they have a 15-minute status meeting (which isn't that big of a deal; it's a minor annoyance but it actually can defuse politics and suspicion). Others haul out the whole shebang, with nightmarish "ceremonies" that take hours and involve beasts like "product backlogs" and "business user stories" meant to spread disease.
By "Scrum compliant", I meant the sort of mediocre (or junior) engineer who will accept being managed down to the day.
That said, I don't think that Agile or Scrum is the right thing, even for juniors. Junior engineers should be getting daily feedback, but it should be in the form of genuine doing-the-right-thing mentoring, not continual progress tracking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A dual income couple can tolerate more risk, but in my experience they are unwilling. After marriage, a couple's risk tolerance skews a lot closer to a woman's risk tolerance than to a man's.
> A dual income couple can tolerate more risk, but in my experience they are unwilling. After marriage, a couple's risk tolerance skews a lot closer to a woman's risk tolerance than to a man's. How is someone's gender in any way relevant to their financial risk tolerance?
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full
And interestingly, this study was just posted here today, showing that testosterone levels fall in married men: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13129483