101–110 of 192 posts
Reason to hire a young programmer based on the confession from CTO: we like college grads because we can drive them hard and pay them minimal salaries. The only thing is they burn out pretty quickly. And yes they also lamented the quality of their software and how releases were buggy and delayed. Not sure they saw a connection there... To attract the candidates they optimized non-salary benefits they thought college…
Reason to hire a young programmer based on the confession from CTO: we like college grads because we can drive them hard and pay them minimal salaries. The only thing is they burn out pretty quickly. And yes they also lamented the quality of their software and how releases were buggy and delayed. Not sure they saw a connection there... To attract the candidates they optimized non-salary benefits they thought college…
I am 33 and have a 4 year old son who will be starting school this September. The biggest benefit for me that any company could offer would be true flexibility with regards to my working hours and location. I have been self-employed for the past ~7 years and it has been great as I have been able to balance work with the first few years of my sons life. Time I will never get back so being able to be there every day ha…
So there are companies that will let you do that just have to find them.
How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.
We do awesome (36 here). 1. Because I've had many interviews where people ask one of perhaps 200 questions over and over (reverse a double linked list, serialize a tree). 2. I do complicated stuff, daily . Multithreaded communications patterns. Cross platform code. Memory / performance optimizations. Etc. All syntax from plain C to C++14 plus extensions. When I have to do a basic data structure operation, on a single…
When talking with young programmers I too often think "well, you are doing that wrong, been there, done that". They don't want to listen. A couple of months later they notice that the gray beard ones were right. From a company perspective, that's just too late, as the money loss is not recoverable. There is nothing wrong with being a young one with no experience. There is so much wrong when a company has only a bunch…
Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…
However: I strongly suspect the reason for both generalizations to exist is the fact that we as humans tend to remember the extreme encounters the most - the obvious observation being that the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to all ages.
And that's another reason to consider: yes, there are young people that has these traits, but mostly it comes from experience (or as we say here, 'colmillo').
The other big factor is the old saying that old dogs don't learn new tricks, so it's difficult to guide them towards the company vision, and it's worse when they have a boss that could be their son.
Those are my experiences based on Mexico, I know there are better places in the world with different mindsets, I just wanted to include my thoughts on this topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally wouldn't target those companies. They tend to employ on a permanant basis and the contract market is a bigger payer. Also after a few years in the game you tend to get targetted by recruiters as you may have specialised into certain areas. i.e. finance. So for example, I don't normally look for work, it normally finds me.
Could you give some examples of where you first got your contracts (outside of personal connections)? The contract market seems great (I'm in it right now), but finding decent positions seems pretty difficult without a pre-existing large network. Also, a lot of the sites that feature contract work ask for way too many details, and are basically a race to the bottom on price, sometimes at the expense of quality, and I…
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
When talking with young programmers I too often think "well, you are doing that wrong, been there, done that". They don't want to listen. A couple of months later they notice that the gray beard ones were right. From a company perspective, that's just too late, as the money loss is not recoverable. There is nothing wrong with being a young one with no experience. There is so much wrong when a company has only a bunch…
> They don't want to listen Hire older programmers because they don't make sweeping generalizations.
How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.
That's the entire point. These sorts of interviews are an easy, legal way to filter out the "olds." And you're old in this industry by the time you amass 10 years of experience.
If there were really a shortage of programmers, ageism would not be an issue. As it is, there is an extreme glut of talented programmers and it's definitely a buyer's market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, growing older, I've found both of these generalizations to be true in myself. There are plenty of times that I've watched junior developers make literally the exact same mistakes I made 10 years ago. At the same time, I've learned that technology has continued to move on and things that were wrong 10 years ago may not be wrong today. I remember when I started out that I'd scour every line of code fo…
Problem is a lots of young people may not seeing old people and old knowledge the same way like old people do. They may think the old programmer are leak of passion, just there to do their part of job, not creating things and "Change the world" like they do. For example when you tell them to parse HTTP header with a 256 buffer, they may argue why not give me 4K buffer so they can done it more easily, "It's fine to us…
I've had discussions with "industry veterans" that didn't get the fundamentals about their machines straight (a couple of them, for example, seemed to be ignorant of the fact that caching is a thing and influences your memory access delays).
Usually, that wouldn't be much of a problem, except when they claimed authority on performance and how hot-path algorithms should be implemented. The upside to those discussions is that they're usually easily settled with a couple of benchmarks and unit tests.
Similarly, I'm often puzzled whenever I encounter someone who works on a ("official") C++ project and e.g. refuses to use RAII and/or const properly. I get that you might dislike to depend on too many "external" tools, but just throwing the upsides of the language you're using away because "that's not how we did it back in the day" really bugs me. I can't avoid the impression that those people are being willingly ignorant...