71–80 of 92 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, the cargo-culting of logical fallacies
I think things work differently at the C-suite level. This guy was never a developer. He was a founder and CEO with a successful exit. He was hired as a former founder and CEO, by a business working in the same space in which he was a founder and CEO. It's an interesting story, but unfortunately its relevance to the career trajectory of the average tech old-timer is somewhere close to zero.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a lot of us younger engineers would love to see the results of that type of analysis, as biased and incomplete as it inevitably would be. My career planning will be significantly different under the assumption "as long as I feed my curiosity and stay up to date, I have a reasonable expectation of continuing a primarily technical career until retirement age" vs "it's vital that I've built up some non-technical…
I would say that non-technical competencies are not optional and they will help your career one way or another. Maybe a better question to ask ourselves is how do I continue to add value in the environment I'm in? I doubt the answer to that remains constant throughout a long career.
If value means helping the marketing team at apple to sell more useless (but admitedly super-technological) phones, then count me out :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.
Those of us born in after 1965 are not baby boomers. We are gen x. I don't buy that there much different between gen x and gen y
Another good thing to ignore is decade based commentary. We haven't seen it much since the 1990's because 2000's and 10's are a bit cumbersome. But believe me once we hit 2020 it's going to be on like Donkey Kong and won't let up until 2100 with "Are you a 20s girl?" and "10 things to look forward to with the 20s" and on and on.
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…
My Monday's afternoon: Read hacker news all day and eat ice cream. Thinking about what to poc next (of course, that counts as work).
Coworker Monday's afternoon: Tried to migrate a thing in place to get the new improvements. Didn't make a backup. The update failed and fucked the system. Stayed until 8pm to un fuck it. (Then we'll have to continue restoring it fully tomorrow).
See. He's worked full time and overtime already + many hours lost (for both of us) because we had to fix shit in emergency + many hours lost by other people who are impacted.
That's a ton of overwork and negative productivity. I could eat ice cream for half the week and still be significantly more productive than that.
P.S. This example is for toying around with production systems, it's easy to understand and evaluate. We can do examples with bad design decisions that destroy the project and are 100 times worse :D
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…
Now, if you're in a field that REQUIRES well written code (mission critical systems etc.) then being able to do so is of course a merit. But using good coding skills as an argument for higher salary at your average tech company just doesn't make sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, hello? This is the most atypical model possible for older tech workers. A hugely successful hospitality CEO joins a tech startup disrupting the global hospitality industry. How is that experience instructive for anyone except Chip Conley? Emotional intelligence in Mr. Conley's world apparently doesn't require any sense of irony. How hospitable.
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…