Dude, this long term strategy sounds too mature: "By contrast, he says, economies that embrace the Silicon Valley model writ large—throwing massive amounts of money at highly speculative investments—are suspiciously bubble-prone."
The Brutal Ageism of Tech
191–200 of 361 posts
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#192Experience is not a matter of age, as it is not a matter of time. One need not be fooled by the elder who claims 20 years of experience, when in fact he has 1 year of experience repeated 20 times. That is why a teenager can possibly have the same experience as his middle aged counterpart.
Innovation is not a matter of age either. It's mostly about observance and imagination which are qualities that can either increase with age, if one nurtures it, or diminish with age if one is unaware.
That is to say; both experience and innovation are NOT age related.
As human beings, we cannot help but be influenced by prevailing outlook in our immediate social circles, and the media we're exposed to. It is our responsibility to be aware of this bias, and find THAT WHICH transcends age.
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a huge part of it, folks who stop "keeping up" with the technology eventually find there is a huge amount of catching up to do. When that happens, especially if there isn't a lot of runway, it can be difficult. I remark to folks all the time that you can take someone right out of high school, and have them spend about 2000 hrs learning about "computers" and now they are 'hot shot programmers' that are…
>Had they instead spent that six months re-tuning old talents, sending out the occasional resume, and building stuff, that seems to get people hired regardless of age. There are two problems with that logic. The first is if you have only six months of experience doing something your pay is likely to reflect that. Second, look at it from an employer's perspective. You can hire a twenty year old or a fifty year old. Th…
> Who do you think is going to be more productive? Who's going to put in 16 hour days at crunch time?
I'm 31 years old, have been doing lots of crunch times of 16 hour days that lasted for weeks and I really hate this expectation and mentality.
I'm more productive than ever, even though I started saying NO to overtime, because fuck you. Yet, I've worked with plenty of beginners and when I say beginners, I'm talking about 5+ years of experience and I have been more productive then all of them, even though they've been more eager than me to work overtime.
The difference has been in the following areas:
1. less experienced engineers when facing a hard problem tend to slap some code in place that barely does what the feature request asks for, without thinking of the implications much, like the potential for accidental errors, or how that code interacts with the business logic already in place, or how that functionality will interact with future features already planned. And so every sprint, every release you end up reworking/rewriting/fixing stuff from previous releases, because a rookie skipped the due diligence and slapped a poorly thought out turd. As a consequence, that's why we have software development methodologies, like Scrum, or whatever agile bullshit is the latest fad, because process is required to get good results with average people.
2. no man can keep focusing for more than 7 hours per day on average. Yes, I've been able to stay "in the zone" for more than 12 hours occasionally, however the average for really good people is no more than 7 hours. The rest of the time is filled with "busy work", like pointless meetings, replying to email, reading HN and staring at the monitor stupidly. If you don't believe me, install RescueTime and marvel at the huge amounts of daily jerking off.
3. Solid work requires a well rested mind. I'm at the top of my game when I sleep well at night and I get great ideas in the periods in which I have a good social life.
4. I learn faster than any 20-something, because I have a solid knowledge base. For example it takes me about 2 weeks to become functional in any programming language, that's because I've already worked in production and played with about a dozen thus far and in regards to paradigms, I've already worked with them all.
> No wife or children.
5. Pity that you view that as a liability. As a father of a 4-year old boy, I can tell you, a child is the greatest motivation you could ever have, which is why I trust people with children at home more than I trust a 20-something that hasn't felt what true responsibility is like.
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#194Personally, my experience in the valley (being hired as well hiring people) has been not been guided by age. My experience has been with the startup since it was at 50 member to well over 100 now.
I am in early 30s, which means I am mostly interviewing for senior engineering position. I have been part of teams where we have made offers to several folks older than I am for similar or higher position. This is the only time when age does come up for discussion (is he really qualified to be a senior or not?)
However, some patterns I do notice from time to time are:
- Younger folks are more eager at times to do more.
- Their enthusiasm also comes with quality of work that needs some additional care. But, it is critical we mentor them during these times.
- Older folks are generally more clear on what they want to work and how they want to solve a problem. Experience most likely.
- The really bad situation to be in is when some of the older (senior) folks don't drive and take initiatives and just wade through. With someone senior you want them to be there to mentor, help, guide, keep an eye out on many things, but we have seen a few senior folks who don't make that effort - This is probably the #1 problem I have seen in teams. A sense of agility is almost vital.
- I have seen the same lack of "drive" amongst some younger devs as well.
- End of the day, its not age, its almost the subject scale of how passionate they are about their work that has worked for us. Old/young is really irrelevant.
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints. Experienced people have learned a set of platonic causations that they apply to pattern matched situations. When they come into a new situation, if they match patterns that don't quite fit, they'll apply old solutions to situations that are not appropriate. Enders Game is a good allegory for this. It's good to have diversity and meritocratic pr…
A competent person would understand why the solution did or didn't work the previous times, and thus why it would or wouldn't this time. What you're saying is that some people don't learn from their experiences. You should focus on finding out if they have. That's worth way more than hoping that this young kid will.
Smart and wisdom of experience together are as kids say... gangster. It's only when a person gives up either learning or trying and accept status quo that their ability to make a big impact can be questioned, and that can happen at any age or sometimes never with a lucky few.
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I see this: > The first is if you have only six months of experience doing something your pay is likely to reflect that. My experience is building things has very little to do with the current frameworks and languages. Building a payroll system with a NoSQL back end and an AWS front end is "different" than building the same with an Xwindows client and an Oracle back end, but the things that may a payroll…
Honestly I've found for the most part that those who work 6-9 hours get more done than those who work 10+. Usually those spending 10+ are playing catchup or learning a new technology at the same time.
I recently had an interesting experience interviewing with a startup (which shall remain nameless). During the interview process, we had a nice discussion about sustainable development practices, and I talked about my willingness to put in the occasional long day as needed. When we got to the point where they expected me to work 60+ hours a week for the next year, they cut me loose.
I could have probably done it, but really only 6-9 hours a day, like you say, would have been actually working on what they were paying me to work on. I'm still not sure how a schedule like that could ever have been considered sustainable for anyone who wants to have any of: a social life, family, or professional development time (going to meetups and such).
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#197The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…
The software industry has been growing rapidly in recent decades, and the growth has been concentrated in a few geographic areas. So employers in those areas (especially Silicon Valley, and also smaller hubs like Seattle and Boston) have to recruit a lot of their workers from other regions, as their job openings grow faster than the "organic" growth of the local worker population. Theory: This importing of workers ha…
Another interesting aspect to rapid growth is to note where the influx of new developers is coming from.
The need for developers is so strong that all the major tech companies are devoting resources to recruiting as soon as developers graduate.
That dynamic could account for a reasonably large part of the age imbalance in the industry. If there was a similar-sized pipeline of recently-trained developers with a more diverse age group than university students the story would likely be different.
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Had they instead spent that six months re-tuning old talents, sending out the occasional resume, and building stuff, that seems to get people hired regardless of age. There are two problems with that logic. The first is if you have only six months of experience doing something your pay is likely to reflect that. Second, look at it from an employer's perspective. You can hire a twenty year old or a fifty year old. Th…
> Who do you think is going to be more productive? Who's going to put in 16 hour days at crunch time? I'm 31 years old, have been doing lots of crunch times of 16 hour days that lasted for weeks and I really hate this expectation and mentality. I'm more productive than ever, even though I started saying NO to overtime, because fuck you. Yet, I've worked with plenty of beginners and when I say beginners, I'm talking a…
I'd like to know where you work that you can say "fuck you" to overtime during crunch period. Because, you know, I might like to work there. Seriously, contact me. :) My email is in my profile.
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
A decision to specialize in mobile in 2009 would probably have even worked out for a 60+ engineer if they were good at it. The best way to combat ageism is to stay technically relevant. Good decision.
> The best way to combat ageism is to stay technically relevant. As I get older, I find that is easier said than done. I still spend quite a lot of time learning new things, but I've become less interested in learning things that are immediately marketable. Learning yet another framework that is marginally different than the one I used on the last project is not the interesting pursuit it once was. At this point I wo…
Take a free online course at Edx: https://www.edx.org/course-list
Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech
#200The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…
One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints. Experienced people have learned a set of platonic causations that they apply to pattern matched situations. When they come into a new situation, if they match patterns that don't quite fit, they'll apply old solutions to situations that are not appropriate. Enders Game is a good allegory for this. It's good to have diversity and meritocratic pr…
> One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints.
Prove it with some research. The current research shows that people really don't make their best contributions to their field before 35-45.
And, to be fair, I see more young people who attempt to hit the screw with a hammer because a hammer is the only tool they have.