Discrimination does pay. That's why it's so widespread.
How the Valley treats experienced people
391–400 of 508 posts
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's fewer kids born today, there's a likelihood of fewer coders in 20 years.
On the other hand, 1 person who knows AWS well today can do things that would take huge capital investments and a team of 40 people 20 years ago
I'd rather be the child of an experienced dev than not.
Rolling your own infrastructure is in a lot of ways def easier than rolling your own programming stack today.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#393The "Get rich and get out" expectation is in place because working at the pace that lots of SV companies demand creates an unacceptably high risk of burnout. To compensate for this risk many workers and entrepreneurs have setup a mental and social framework of "I'm only doing this until I can retire young".
Of course, early retirement happens for vanishingly few workers. Some companies go Google or Uber and let the founders retire, but most do not.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, 1 person who knows AWS well today can do things that would take huge capital investments and a team of 40 people 20 years ago
On the other other hand, the total number of programmers has increased dramatically compared to 20 years ago notwithstanding those improvements.
If I had the choice to be the child of an experienced developer vs not.. I'd want to go as fast as possible and not have to relearn things myself the slow way.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there’s an element of expectation there. The college hire might grow to be a grand wizard in 10 years, and become a massive asset to the company. It is still possible the older person is going to become a wizard later, but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already? College hires are seen as unscratched lottery tickets, older workers are seen as known variables. I’m not saying…
who stays at a company for 10 years?
It’s less common than it used to be but I was at one job 13 years, another 8, coming up on 9 at my current one.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
True but you can roll your own infrastructure for much less than it cost 20 years ago. Smart companies rely on cloud up to a tipping point. Then it becomes more cost effective to put in your own infrastructure. AWS and other cloud providers lure customers in with low costs but they get stuck paying a fortune as they start scaling.
I agree. At a smaller scale, I love Heroku for prototype apps, and I would absolutely use them for a startup - right up to the point where I'd be paying the equivalent of 1-2 full-time devops engineers. At that point, it becomes worth it to hire them and transition away. AWS has a similar value proposition, but the tipping point is higher; I'd estimate it at around 15-20 FTEs in Amazon charges before it starts to mak…
Good point. PaaS like heroku, cloudbee or even docker on linode is an order of magnitude simpler to ship than AWS.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too work in a fortune 500 outside the valley. Occasionally I wonder why we lose so many young coders good and bad to SV. I'll then go check salaries using a job hunting site for the same positions in SV and they pay the same or less after adjusting for cost of living. Is there some magic pool of jobs there that let you retired after 10 years that I am not seeing? I'm coming up on 20 years of writing c++ and I'm not…
Your fortune 500 company pays $250-400k total compensation to young coders (2-9 yrs experience)? Which company is it? You don't? Then you're not paying more or less the same...
Really? Who does that? Bit late to figure it out now. I'm almost 40 and I make way less than that range with 20 years of embedded/hpc c++ experience. But still curious.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too work in a fortune 500 outside the valley. Occasionally I wonder why we lose so many young coders good and bad to SV. I'll then go check salaries using a job hunting site for the same positions in SV and they pay the same or less after adjusting for cost of living. Is there some magic pool of jobs there that let you retired after 10 years that I am not seeing? I'm coming up on 20 years of writing c++ and I'm not…
> Is there some magic pool of jobs there that let you retired after 10 years that I am not seeing? Yes there is, actually. It is called "working for one of the big 5 tech companies/or one of the unicorns". 200k+ total comp is the norm for someone with a couple years experience working at one of these places. And god knows how much the people with 10+ years make. A Google L6 (staff engineer) makes something like 450k?
You don’t even need to work for a big-n company to make 200k TC with a few years experience, if that’s your goal.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An employer might prefer having employees with children Isn't this straight up illegal? Only straight ppl can have children, for example.
> Only straight ppl can have children, for example. This "example" is demonstrably false.
yeah you are right. bad example.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#400I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code…
> In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code despite the fact that I told them well in advance that I have never worked with Ruby.
Were you applying to a place that writes a ton of Ruby?