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I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

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Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#41

Post by pcurve »

user5994461 wrote: post #34
pcurve wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in your same age bucket, and when I hear comments like "work smarter rather than just putting in more hours", I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours because people in that age group generally have other life obligations, and eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. You can't always work smarter day in day out, and expect to beat someone who is both smar…

>>> I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours [...] No it's not. As someone who's had 10 jobs by the time I was 25. I can attest that. You can be 10 times more productive by picking a solution that achieves the same for 10 times less effort. And that's what you should do all the time. Whenever you take wrong decisions (let's call that "the design phase"), you have to comp…

"In practise, that means I could play ping pong 4 days a week and still be more productive than most people, because they will do work that require a week to be done, while I will do work that require only the last day, to achieve the same result."

Unless you are surrounded by sea of incompetent workers, I find it hard to believe that one can be 4 times more productive than most people, on consistent basis.

Has enterprise software development become so narrow in amount & scope of assignment given to one person, that quantifying your productivity relative to others is actually possible?

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#42

Post by pcurve »

elmerland wrote: post #39
pcurve wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in your same age bucket, and when I hear comments like "work smarter rather than just putting in more hours", I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours because people in that age group generally have other life obligations, and eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. You can't always work smarter day in day out, and expect to beat someone who is both smar…

My 2-cents here I would say that working smarter directly related to developing your leadership skills. You can do a lot more by helping lead a group of technical people than you could ever do/code by yourself.

Very true, but if you're in your late 30s, mentoring and leading other developers is mostly likely part of your job description. You are in a position to make broader multiplying impact than a junior developer with only 2-3 year under belt.

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#43

Post by rmason »

pcurve wrote: post #5
dlevine wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see this sort of perspective. I would like to see more of it. I'm not 52, but I'm in my late 30s and as an engineer who works at startups, I find myself unable/uninterested in doing the things I did in the past. For example, I find myself having to work smarter rather than just putting in more hours than everyone else (which is what I did in my 20s). It's also important to bring my perspective fro…

I'm in your same age bucket, and when I hear comments like "work smarter rather than just putting in more hours", I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours because people in that age group generally have other life obligations, and eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. You can't always work smarter day in day out, and expect to beat someone who is both smar…

I worked once for a boss that didn't believe coding beyond eight hours was productive. He said that after eight hours the number of bugs went way up. There's a cost to all those bugs that negates the extra hours and he claimed to have the proof of it.

I learned a lot from him and never doubted him on this fact. Unfortunately I've also worked for younger bosses who have yet to make that connection.

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#44

Post by mcguire »

lj3 wrote: post #17
ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

Here you go, the secret to relevance throughout your career: "I’ve spent a lifetime being curious about people and things, which, I guess, means I’m well-read and well connected." In my own experience being naturally curious has led me down interesting paths to meet interesting people and learn amazing things. As a parent I tried (and apparently succeeded) in nurturing the natural curiosity in my children, never shut…

Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.

Note that the author isn't an engineer; he's the ex-CEO of a hotel company.

One believes the situations to be somewhat different.

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#45

Post by Clubber »

rhizome wrote: post #19
alain94040 wrote: post #2

I think this is great advice regardless of your age: > I asked a lot of "why" and "what if" questions, forsaking the "what" and "how" questions on which most senior leaders focus

Maybe it's just my delivery, but in many contexts I've found people who react to "why" questions as confrontational. So much so that of the 6 W's [sic] I think "why" is the line of inquiry most requiring of diplomacy.

In my experience:

1. "Why" is the most important question you can ask, and understand the answer to.

2. If someone is defensive to being asked why, it's because they can't answer it well.

3. If you can't answer it well, you haven't thought it through enough.

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#46

Post by mcguire »

pcurve wrote: post #5
dlevine wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see this sort of perspective. I would like to see more of it. I'm not 52, but I'm in my late 30s and as an engineer who works at startups, I find myself unable/uninterested in doing the things I did in the past. For example, I find myself having to work smarter rather than just putting in more hours than everyone else (which is what I did in my 20s). It's also important to bring my perspective fro…

I'm in your same age bucket, and when I hear comments like "work smarter rather than just putting in more hours", I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours because people in that age group generally have other life obligations, and eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. You can't always work smarter day in day out, and expect to beat someone who is both smar…

On they other hand, you do get to laugh at the younger folks for making the same mistakes you did.

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#47

Post by angersock »

danderino wrote: post #23

"Many young people can read the face of their iPhone better than the face of the person sitting next to them. I’m not saying young people don’t understand emotions. Our digital world is full of emojis, and the term “emo” didn’t exist back in my schoolyard days. But emojis don’t create interpersonal, face-to-face fluency." I am really tired of statements like these.

> I am really tired of statements like these.

Sure, but is it wrong?

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#48

Post by kstenerud »

I'm 42 now, still highly employable, although not at all companies. And that's fine. They want someone who can churn out cheap but perhaps not so good code, more power to them. That's not what I'm interested in, anyway.

But I know what I'm worth. I know that my code is top notch. I know that my standards are above most things out there, and it shows.

I've released almost half a million lines of code for free as open source projects. I've gotten emails from people in the most remarkable industries, asking questions about something I'd written decades ago (for example, http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/sunsite/system/network/daemons/...). I've posted the more useful of them to my github account, and that's the first place potential employers look to see if I'm worth my fee. And I am.

Age only becomes a problem if you stop drilling down into the technologies people use and REALLY understand them, and what lies underneath. Otherwise you really aren't worth any more than the guys coming out of college with no experience.

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#49

Post by MichaelGG »

pcurve wrote: post #41
user5994461 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours [...] No it's not. As someone who's had 10 jobs by the time I was 25. I can attest that. You can be 10 times more productive by picking a solution that achieves the same for 10 times less effort. And that's what you should do all the time. Whenever you take wrong decisions (let's call that "the design phase"), you have to comp…

"In practise, that means I could play ping pong 4 days a week and still be more productive than most people, because they will do work that require a week to be done, while I will do work that require only the last day, to achieve the same result." Unless you are surrounded by sea of incompetent workers, I find it hard to believe that one can be 4 times more productive than most people, on consistent basis. Has enter…

It's probably far, far worse than that. How do you count things like when someone suggests using a database/structure/system that is very poorly suited and spends 3 months or more before giving up versus someone that can figure out ahead of time it won't work? Or when someone suggests an approach that is error prone and continually introduces faults, yet had a slightly lower startup time? Or when a system is designed and needs 20x the hardware? Or requires literally 1000x the processing?

While in some very constrained, straightforward coding challenges it might be hard to find orders of magnitude improvement, a lot of designing software has a huge range of solutions. It might be the case that a single org doesn't get to compare.

Re: I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

#50

Post by dlwdlw »

This just feels irrelevant to me. Ageism is directed towards older individual contributors, not higher level executives whose job is mostly strategy. (And unofficially, providing meaning and perspective to the younger workers)

It even seems to provide proof that being an older IC makes you irrelevant because the success story is not a coder. The lesson is that as you age it's either up or out. You either learn higher level skills or slowly fade into irrelevance as your ideological baggage acts as an achor distancing you from keeping pace with the now constant supply of young grads. (Now that coding is "cool")

At the very very abstract level, companies are divided into people seeking meaning and those that provide it. Upper level executives provide meaning in work for the ICs. For the middle level executives they provide meaning in the "company".

As you age, you're expected to be more wise and knowledgeable. Staying as an IC is a black mark of sorts that you've plateaued at some point. You either need to move into a meaning providing (or meaning enforcing) role, or stay as an IC but provide meaning in the form of technical wisdom. Otherwise, all else being equal, you stand out amongst the younger workforce.

Previous rewarding specialization does not mean future rewarding specialization. The world can shift in a way so that your skills and ideologies and perspectives are useless. The ageism prevalent in silicon valley is that it's unkind to equally skilled low level people with one lerson being older.

If your an older person and your skills are actually in great demand but low suppl(strategy and meaning making)y, the ageism doesn't apply.

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