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Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

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Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#101

Post by c00p3r »

It is not about age itself, it all about motivated, young software developers who will accept minimum wage.

It is almost the same story as with foreign laborers, who will accept almost any terms, that are slightly better than at their home, and they already got motivation and taken risks.

Young, inexperienced people are much easy to manipulate and control, due to their naivety, lack of market understanding and inexperience.

The same practices are used on campuses, where some professors agitate students to get a part-time jobs or a test-task, with very low, or even no payments et all, while they're collecting the result and creating products for profit.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#102

Post by HilbertSpace »

hga wrote: post #42
HilbertSpace wrote: post #29

Also over the past 10 years, venture capital in Silicon Valley lost money. Generally the venture partners do not know how to build significant businesses. Look at their backgrounds and see why. Compare with people doing significant work in technology for, say, the US DoD.

While I don't agree with your general point those are things with have always been true. For the last 10 year period I can't exactly blame the venture partners for SarBox ending the IPO exit (as another article has noted, in the last ten years there have been fewer > $100 million exits than there are VC firms). Add in the dot.com crash which started a bit before SarBox and the Great Recession and it's no surprise the…

I can't judge the impact of SarbOx.

My guess is that the IPO market remains open for a solid company -- good market position, plenty of revenue and earnings, good record of earnings. But there have not been very many such companies built, even private where SarbOx doesn't apply.

My take is that we need to do better at building solid companies. I'm trying. I know some people I'd like to have on my Board, but I don't see any in a venture firm. Sorry 'bout that.

This should be "the best of times" due to a 1 TB Seagate drive for $60, an Asus mobo with a dual core AMD for $100, plenty of GbE, fantastic 'framework' software -- I'm using .NET and find Visual Basic .NET to be fine. I use the compiler just via command line and think it's fine.

The US just needs to do MUCH better at building significant new companies. I've heard that SarbOx costs about $1 million a year for a company to follow it. For a significant company, okay.

Just how VCs are going to get an exit with Facebook and Twitter I don't know.

There is a Great Recession out there, but I sense that there is also a LOT of cash 'on the sidelines'.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#103

Post by sethg »

patio11 wrote: post #8

To the extent that this reflects material reality, it suggests that there is an arbitrage opportunity for anyone who can get a babyfaced twenty-something to front for a team of 30+ year veterans with deep domain expertise and 10x productivity. All you have to do is have the consultant bios note their WoW habits and 7 weeks of professional experience with Merb and Cucumber testing.

Ah, yes, “Potemkin Consulting”.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#104

Post by Locke1689 »

tptacek wrote: post #67
cageface wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do it ridiculously better than they do. That sounds nice on paper, but there are a lot of extremely talented and productive young programmers on the market now. The kind of education you can provide yourself if you really dive into the open-source world and things like github simply wasn't available even ten years ago. So yeah, do your best , in the old fashioned sense of the word before people became so enchanted wi…

Can any of them reliably find SQL injection, write a fuzzer, or spot an integer overflow? I'll pay you multiple thousands of dollars to refer them to me. If not, re-read Patrick's comment with that in mind.

I only know the basics of these (SQL injection and integer overflow for kicks in high school, dumb context-aware codec fuzzer for a memory allocation bug in FFmpeg), but I'd like to take your quiz to see what I'm missing. I'm co-teaching NetPen at Northwestern this fall and want to know what I can focus on.

I'm turning 21 in a couple months, for whatever it's worth.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#105

Post by tptacek »

Locke1689 wrote: post #104
tptacek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can any of them reliably find SQL injection, write a fuzzer, or spot an integer overflow? I'll pay you multiple thousands of dollars to refer them to me. If not, re-read Patrick's comment with that in mind.

I only know the basics of these (SQL injection and integer overflow for kicks in high school, dumb context-aware codec fuzzer for a memory allocation bug in FFmpeg), but I'd like to take your quiz to see what I'm missing. I'm co-teaching NetPen at Northwestern this fall and want to know what I can focus on. I'm turning 21 in a couple months, for whatever it's worth.

Email me, and we'll figure out a good time for you to come buy and visit; I'll buy you coffee. We're super easy to get to.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#106

Post by lzw »

bokonist wrote: post #76
lzw wrote: post #39

Zuckerberg advocated age discrimination outright from the stage of startup camp 2007. Of course at his age, he doesn't know any better. Here's a big secret, it isn't a struggle for older people to keep up with younger people. It is actually easier for me to pick new technology, or languages now than when I was a 20 year old programmer.... And I'm able to take responsibility for projects and order of magnitude more co…

Almost never have I been on an interviewed where they actually checked to see if I was qualified competently. And universally the ones who did, didn't ask me to write code for them. What they did the companies who actually checked your competence ask you?

That was a side point, not really fully expressed. But part of the point I was trying to make is that there's no secret interview question and no trick questions. The best ones have been interviews where we talked about a problem they were working on. The best interview question is to tell the prospect about what the company is doing and the assumptions behind it, and see what questions they ask, and then go from there. Ask them about a hobby, ask them about anything that interests them. The important thing is to get them talking. In doing so you can find out how they think. Don't ask trick algorithm questions. (Got asked one of them 6 times in a row once because it was apparently the fad that year. )

Ask them how they like to work, do they like big projects or small ones? Do they like to work alone or in groups? What kind of reference material they like to keep handy. All of these can be phrased as sort of "how can we best support you as an employee" questions, but they will tell you a lot.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#107

Post by lzw »

neeson wrote: post #81
lzw wrote: post #39

Zuckerberg advocated age discrimination outright from the stage of startup camp 2007. Of course at his age, he doesn't know any better. Here's a big secret, it isn't a struggle for older people to keep up with younger people. It is actually easier for me to pick new technology, or languages now than when I was a 20 year old programmer.... And I'm able to take responsibility for projects and order of magnitude more co…

Thank you. This is exactly the kind of thoughtful, quality post that contributes positively to the discussion.

You should try it sometime.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#108

Post by Groxx »

lzw wrote: post #107
neeson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. This is exactly the kind of thoughtful, quality post that contributes positively to the discussion.

You should try it sometime.

Someone has a vendetta.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1642069 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1642075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1642072

Chill a bit. Even if the trolling has gone both directions to some degree, feeding it doesn't improve squat.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#109

Post by mikeytown2 »

lzw wrote: post #39

Zuckerberg advocated age discrimination outright from the stage of startup camp 2007. Of course at his age, he doesn't know any better. Here's a big secret, it isn't a struggle for older people to keep up with younger people. It is actually easier for me to pick new technology, or languages now than when I was a 20 year old programmer.... And I'm able to take responsibility for projects and order of magnitude more co…

We have engineers in their 50's; as the youngest on the dev team at my work, I'm getting closer to 30. It's nice working with a bunch of x-Microsoft guys (people who started in the early 1990's there).

I've had the privilege to interviewed potential hires. It's always fun to ask why they put down java/javascript on their resumes. Point being, we have all dev job applications come to someone on the dev team. We know what to look for, why let HR mess it up? From our point of view it has nothing to do with your age & everything to do with your skill set.

IMHO asking canned interview questions is not the best idea. Ask them "what are you currently working on". Then ask them to write code in that language. Start with simple things like a loop and go from there. You can learn a lot by seeing how they do it. If they have done any kind of open source code thats always a huge plus; you get to see the code before the interview is scheduled, always nice.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#110

Post by Poiesis »

cageface wrote: post #91
tptacek wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time, read the comment carefully before fixating on a single word and starting an unproductive argument. I know it's hard; I do it all the time too. Re-read Patrick's comment, but this time, take the Cliff's Notes with you: * It's not enough to be better; you have to find ways to be measurably better; implied: better along axes that people who write checks care about. * Learn to market yourself; implied; the bus…

Were we arguing? I thought we were discussing. Patrick's built a nice business for himself but I spent the last ten years working with some of the people that wrote the foundational research papers on computer graphics, not building bingo card generators, so maybe we're looking at this from different ends of the pipe.

Summary:

Cageface: the old guys better watch out because there's lots of hungry smart young guys.

Patio11: anyone regardless of age needs to understand how they create value and aggressively point this out unambiguously. And creating value doesn't mean solely working hard or being smart.

Cageface is cautioning to not assume more experience means higher value. Patio11 sorta did the same thing cageface did earlier and keyed in on the "60+ hours" bit. His (patio11) point is that the way to demonstrate value is not to count yourself among the young, or old, or authors of foundational research papers on computer graphics.

I've been in my position a few years now, and I have accumulated domain knowledge that is valuable to my employer. I have no doubts that someone else could come by this body of knowledge, but it would certainly take time an mistakes. If I do not make these differences obvious (measurable and visible), I fail to do so at my own peril.

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