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How the Valley treats experienced people

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#401

Post by _iiu1 »

Kalium wrote: post #321
brian_cunnie wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 54 and have been working in Silicon Valley/SF since '96. Ageism: One way to combat it is to have a good network. Of the 7 jobs I've had in the last 20 years, 6 of them were from personal reference (schoolmate, co-worker, friend). You don't need to be a badass, just dependable. Work around your limitations: I'm not as sharp as I was in my forties, and this is especially apparent when I pair-program with someone ha…

> Stay fresh: I know a 69-year-old developer/contractor say to me, "2000 was pretty good but after that the work dried up — I guess they didn't need COBOL programmers anymore". He had never bothered to stay current. This is one that a lot of people have trouble with. One of the best engineers I ever worked with was in his 60s at the time, and seems to have stopped learning new organizational systems sometime in the 1…

what if they actually are newfangled bullshit? (a mere proposition, as fads fade. I merely ask you to entertain this proposal)

It sounds like another entity might be able to use his brain a bit more thoroughly.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#402

Post by pdimitar »

lowercased wrote: post #72
nikanj wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

> but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already? An aspect of this thinking is that people don't always know how to identify those 'wizards' if they can only evaluate someone against the company's own internal tech/lingo. Someone very well might be a 'wizard' - demonstrably so with experience on visible projects. But if the interviewing staff can't parse out those skills in to somethi…

I think that's one of the very crucial elements of the ever-so-mythical "cultural fit": namely that most companies hire people that look like the median value of all employees already hired. They often don't seem to look for the best they can find.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#403

Post by tachyonbeam »

shmat wrote: post #87
xuki wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't beat yourself up, hindsight is 20/20.

The only one I beat myself up over is hanging on to options too long, since that was greed. The other decisions were all reasonable given what I knew at the time.

I think it doesn't have to be all or nothing, it could also be possible to have a balanced approach to this problem. If your options start to be worth quite a bit more than your buy in price (eg: 2x), you can exercise some percentage of them but keep the rest. People more vested in investing would probably say that the ideal strategy would involve picking some thresholds ahead of time. Either way, there's always some amount of luck in this. The amount of things you don't know is a lot larger than what you do know. You may also not be in the right financial position to invest when a great opportunity shows up.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#404

Post by ghaff »

user5994461 wrote: post #291
ghaff wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been given this advice and I'm skeptical. You can only mask things to a certain degree, it can make you look like you're hiding something (which you are), and the hiring manager will figure it out soon enough in any case. If they really want to age discriminate you're probably better off finding out sooner than later anyway. In any case, later career jobs tend to come from personal networks anyway. My resume was…

It's not hiding anything. A resume is a two pages flyer to advertise your services. It doesn't pretend to accurately represent you as a person or 40 years of accumulated experience. It's really bad if a resume never pass the first screening, it literally can't get a job. It's not reasonable to blame age for that, interviewers cannot guess the age from just a resume (and if they can they shouldn't let be).

Yes, it’s a flyer but it’s a flyer that many expect to include specific information in a specific format. You are free to ignore those expectations of course but employers are also free to draw various conclusions about apparent employment gaps, incomplete work history, etc. even if those conclusions aren’t warranted.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#405

Post by pdimitar »

humanrebar wrote: post #94
auxym wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The college hire might grow to be a grand wizard in 10 years, and become a massive asset to the company. I'm not sure if employers are aware of this, but people staying at companies over 10 years are getting exceedingly rare.

Only because employers don't orient pay and promotion schedules around market rates and experience levels. If you're ten years at the same company, it's exceptional that you couldn't get an offer for significantly more money. Paying "market rate" is a policy for new hires, not existing devs as much.

> Paying "market rate" is a policy for new hires, not existing devs as much.

And as you pointed out, that's a huge mistake. To this day I cannot understand why people simply don't do meetings where somebody says "okay guys and girls, we have a new need in the company; you 5 here aren't heavily loaded -- or we can relieve one of you of their current duties to work on the new thing -- is somebody up for it?"

I have witnessed such an approach I think twice for 17 years of career. And it worked really well the both times. Re-negotiating salaries is a matter of understanding and realizing that you now bring more value and/or carry more responsibility. For some reason HRs and CEOs absolutely hate raising wages of existing employees. They might hire somebody new at 3x the salary of a current senior engineer (seen that as well, and the new hire had significantly less expertise!) but they will be damned before they allow that current engineer get a higher wage.

It might be that they are afraid that if they raise one wage then everybody will demand the same. But I don't see how this would be different with a new hire. No more than 2 months in they will be sharing details of their arrangement with the other colleagues during the lunch break. Same thing, cat get outs of the bag sooner or later.

That phenomena -- huge resistance to raising wages of existing employees -- remains a mystery to me to this day.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#406

Post by justaaron »

user5994461 wrote: post #291
ghaff wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been given this advice and I'm skeptical. You can only mask things to a certain degree, it can make you look like you're hiding something (which you are), and the hiring manager will figure it out soon enough in any case. If they really want to age discriminate you're probably better off finding out sooner than later anyway. In any case, later career jobs tend to come from personal networks anyway. My resume was…

It's not hiding anything. A resume is a two pages flyer to advertise your services. It doesn't pretend to accurately represent you as a person or 40 years of accumulated experience. It's really bad if a resume never pass the first screening, it literally can't get a job. It's not reasonable to blame age for that, interviewers cannot guess the age from just a resume (and if they can they shouldn't let be).

can and do. your premise is faulty

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#407

Post by justaaron »

WalterBright wrote: post #20
buoyantair wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me no matter how smart you play, if you are born in this world at a very vulnerable position, like say a marginal group like lgbtq communities in third world or in a war torn area or with disabilities, no matter how smart and hard you work, you are always a few clicks behind those who have the "luck" and everything else on their side. The world is super unfair place and sometimes even if you work really smart a…

I'm talking about the US and being an able-bodied adult.

yeah, I got the part about the American mythological construct of the Meritocracy being deeply ingrained in your brain.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#408

Post by Kalium »

_iiu1 wrote: post #401
Kalium wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stay fresh: I know a 69-year-old developer/contractor say to me, "2000 was pretty good but after that the work dried up — I guess they didn't need COBOL programmers anymore". He had never bothered to stay current. This is one that a lot of people have trouble with. One of the best engineers I ever worked with was in his 60s at the time, and seems to have stopped learning new organizational systems sometime in the 1…

what if they actually are newfangled bullshit? (a mere proposition, as fads fade. I merely ask you to entertain this proposal) It sounds like another entity might be able to use his brain a bit more thoroughly.

> what if they actually are newfangled bullshit? (a mere proposition, as fads fade. I merely ask you to entertain this proposal)

That might be true and both you and he correct in every single way! But in this particular context it wouldn't have mattered one whit - he and I were working on a contracted project where the counterparty had mandated agile and it was written into the contract. It didn't matter if he liked or believed in agile methodologies. What mattered was whether he would learn them enough to be an effective team lead. He refused.

Quite often, new things are actually newfangled and universally less useful than extant tools. In such cases, I expect the wiser heads who can spot that to be able to clearly and compellingly make the case for why this is true in every scenario where one might consider using the new and inferior tool. He did not and could not.

Again, you're completely right. Lots of things are just value-free newfangled bullshit. There just might be a subtle distinction to be made between an old hand pronouncing something as such and it being an incontrovertible fact.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#409

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

markbnj wrote: post #334

I kind of feel like the author is referring to Zuckerberg's famous comment about young people being smarter. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was suitably shocking and stupid so it's a candidate anyway. The thing I like about Rachel's take on this is that she gets right to the key thing: regardless of what field you're in, or how you spend your time, the vast majority of us are going to be neither horrible fa…

Given that this is something Zuckerberg said 12 years ago, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he doesn't think that way anymore. (The benefits of experience!)

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#410

Post by jpatokal »

lrem wrote: post #327
stale2002 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Note that Google (and presumably the others) pay for performance, not tenure. 10 years in you might be L8-9 and earn a million or be L4 and, well, not earn a million ;) Source: I'm keeping a pace of 1 promo / 2 years in Google. I've seen people going both faster and slower (and some stopping at L4, because why bother).

Promos at Google get exponentially harder at each level, which also means the mean time between promos increases as you go up. L9 is Senior Director, meaning you're managing hundreds of people, and hitting that in 10 years is highly unlikely.
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