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 failures nor amazing successes. We're far more likely to just be ordinary human beings, who probably need to earn a living and have something useful to do every day. Fwiw I'm 58 and a working site reliability engineer and developer. I don't really live paycheck to paycheck, but neither can I just quit working and go instagramming about the globe. I'm fortunate to work for a very diverse company that values everyone for what they can contribute, but I am also cognizant of the people who will look at me and wonder why the greybeard never "made it." Those people probably won't "make it" either, and anyway, nobody seems to wonder why the old Italian guy in the town next to us still gets up every day and fixes shoes.
Zuckerberg said this to attendees at the Y Combinator Startup School event at Stanford in late March, 2007 [1]
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)
"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
Chess masters do commonly mention noticing a decline in what might be called their raw processing power as early as their late 20's, but most results peak in their mid '30's [2] and some peak in their '40's. (And should spending your time playing chess be a marker for intelligence?)
But wisdom is in part knowing what is worth working on (such as should you spend your time playing chess), and that is generally accepted to increase with experience. For example, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. [3]
EDIT: parent comment edited it from 2017 to 2007. That makes a lot more sense
Yeesh, in 2017? Zuckerberg was really young when he get vaulted into power and fame, so I've always been a little more sympathetic than most to his various foot-in-mouth moments[1], particularly in the past. But Jesus, 2017 was _last year_: how is he such a slow study at this?
[1] I should not that I have some pretty severe disagreements with my understanding of his worldview and ethics, but I'm speaking strictly of gaffes here.
Zuckerberg is who he is--the same guy who, in college, called his fellow students "dumb f---s" for trusting him with their data.
People want to excuse that as youth, but he wasn't an 8 year-old; he was an adult, with many of his morals formed. A statement like that is not indicative of immaturity, but insight into character--the way he views himself and other people--and it also reveals a willingness to use dishonesty to take advantage of people for his own gain.
In fact, his entire business model is built on the same "dumb f---s for trusting him" attitude. He has repeatedly monetized the violation of that trust and continues to do so. It's mind-boggling that people continue to allow him to get away with it.
This "gaffe" is not evidence of him being a "slow study", but borne of the same attitude he displayed in college and on many occasions since--one of superiority and condescension to other individuals and groups.
>Zuckerberg is who he is--the same guy who, in college, called his fellow students "dumb f---s" for trusting him with their data.
I don't really get why people constantly bring this up. First of all he's not wrong - anyone with a FB account (including myself) is an idiot for trusting them, and second of all, it's not even really that insensitive. I mean, could most people here really claim to have never said anything as bad as that in college?
> First of all he's not wrong - anyone with a FB account (including myself) is an idiot for trusting them
First of all, many intelligent people got FB accounts in the early days because they didn't know / understand the privacy implications. Eg, some of them surely were college students who went on to become neurosurgeons, astronomers, doctors, etc. They acted on a reasonable heuristic - "this web site looks legit, people I know are using it, there appear to be social benefits, and I live in a country where rule of law is generally enforced, so it's probably safe enough." So they were not dumb categorically, even if their decision in this case turned out to be (arguably) dumb.
Second, for you to call the users idiots for trusting FB is one thing. For Zuckerberg to call them idiots for trusting him is different. A scammer probably thinks of his victims as idiots, whereas their friends think of them as regular people who got tricked. The quote sounds like he meant "because of course I'm going to abuse that trust."
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb f---s
So this quote is brought up not because it shows his insightful analysis of the fact that generally speaking, people should not trust online services, but because it seems to show his own intent, from the beginning, to take advantage of FB users and blame them for trusting him in the first place.
Yes, I agree, which is why I mentioned that I have disagreements with his ethics in general. What I refer to as his gaffes is how bad he seems to be at _hiding_ this from people. Though the fact that it was in 2007 instead of 2017 sort of bolsters my point, as it would be hard to imagine him saying something like this today.
I hear you and not disagreeing. Just adding that there is a lot of hand-wringing over Zuckerberg, his intentions, etc, but it can all be simplified when people recognize--as you have--that he's just not a good human being. In fact, if you really analyze his behavior and how he's wielded his power, there are clear lines of sociopathy that emerge.
So, when I look at it through that lens, whether he's gotten better at avoiding gaffes and all the other analyses just obscure the point that really matters: he's an immensely powerful person with tremendous reach who utterly lacks a moral foundation.
From a point of view, I might even agree with Zuck's asinine statement. When I was in my 20's, I had no idea how many things I truly did not know. So, in my limited "fresh out of college" way, I was pushing maximum intelligence. As the years have flown by, I've learned just how vast many fields are. Introspectively, I've learned that I'm not the brightest mind in any given room. As a matter of fact, I've just barely scratched the surface. Many, as they get older, realize this harsh reality. For me, I was probably very smart... and completely ignorant. In tech, this is inflated as we seem to rediscover old paradigms every few years, yet we look at those that may have lived through an earlier "discovery" as "irrelevant geezers". Many of could never dream to achieve the level of things that Alan Kay has forgotten, but we sure will treat his contemporaries as worthless. Zuck will get there some day. And I doubt history will remember his as a great visionary.
> I've learned that I'm not the brightest mind in any given room
I find it scarier when I am the brightest mind in a room, at least on a specific topic. I understand everyone has different backgrounds and experiences, and given the chance to share, many people can make contributions, even sometimes from people you may not expect at first blush.
There are other times though when, not so much through hubris but sort of... delayed understanding(?) - I end up realizing I am the brightest/smartest in a room (at least for the topics at hand). Sometimes you're expected to lead - false modesty won't do anyone much good there. Sometimes you're expected to lead and someone else ends up thinking they're the smartest one, and become a pain to deal with. Looking back I realize I've been that person, and wonder if I could have done anything differently (honestly don't know - lots of factors at play there).
The day I noticed my tenure was longer than the median Google engineer was horrifying. "You mean half of these people know less than I do how this stuff works?"
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!)
Not relevant to the original discussion or your point, but I've heard Fortran is still in use and pretty performant (and readable) for what it's being used.
Yes, between legacy software (powering expensive and irreplaceable legacy hardware), and a userbase that doesn't care so much about learning the fancy newer tools as long as they can do their experiments, I think it's still standard in many parts of physics.
Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options. I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a company. I also was a "paper" millionaire during the dot-com boom. The start-up where I worked was bought making my options worth millions. There was a 6 month lock out and during that time the stock price went from $75 to $0.75. My options were at $2. Did that make me a bad developer? At another company I had options at $7. The stock peaked a few years later at $60. I never exercised any because I was greedy. I was going to cash out when it hit $75. When I left the company after 6 years, the stock was at $8. All in all, I was almost always one of the best developers, but I never made "FU" money. I did learn to exercise options as soon as they were worth a decent amount, but never made enough to be rich that way. I'm sure there are many old developers who were as dumb financially as I was.
Also, sometimes you don't make enough for early retirement because...gasp...you don't prioritize money over everything else. Some of us have tried to use our talents to do things that are socially responsible. Whether it's doing something in the non-profit space, working on a company that targets the underprivileged, something to do with the environment or anything along those lines, not everyone is comfortable invading people's privacy to serve them ads.
So, yeah, some of us are still working because we had the naivete to want to make the world a better place.
Good for you. We need more people to work on these kinds of problems. I admit that I was not altruistic. In my defense, I've given a lot to charities over the decades.
One thing I learned being a band parent is that the parent's direct involvement during events (being there in person) is much more valuable and appreciated than any money given.
And sometimes (equally ...gasp..) because you just want to work on interesting problems with people you like -- and those jobs didn't pay out the big bucks.
It's amazing to me that so many people think that the point of a tech job is to walk away with a boat load of cash.
I got hurt from that time in a different way. the year before graduation companies was asking me if I would come work for them and not graduate. the next year everyone was out of business and I couldn't find a job as I was competing with devs with years of experience. the following year of still not being able to find work was a different problem, why hire me when they can hire a fresh grad? after 3 years I finally found an IT support position for 28,000/year. I eventually crawled my way out of the situation and making great money at a great company, but that really hurt.
when I see kids graduate now making 100k first year out of college mostly because they graduated during the right time in the right place, I am happy for them but they don't realize how lucky they are
>>I am happy for them but they don't realize how lucky they are
Well, thats the part where wisdom comes in. No one gets lucky. Some people do. But even those don't get lucky all the time.
If you are making $100K straight out of college. Just understand that its an exceptional period in your life. Be grateful and lock up every single cent into some investments.
Or when reality of life comes to hit in mid-30s. Your best is behind you, you have nothing to show for what you've earned, and whats worse- There is no way of earning it back again.
* Startup in Midwestern city. Company never grew much, pivoted several times, still in business selling storage products. If I'd stayed with them, I would have had a long, boring career. One guy I knew did stay there and had a long, boring career.
* Heavy industrial company in Detroit. Acquired by a bigger company long after I left, Detroit plant closed.
* Time-sharing startup company in greater NYC area. Went bust. Technology worked fine, sales not so much. Left 3 weeks before shutdown.
* Time-sharing startup company in Silicon Valley. More successful. Acquired by bigger company after I left. Time-sharing was clearly on the way out. Time to leave that industry.
* Big aerospace company R&D operation. That's where I got into theory. Split into several units years after I left, some acquired by other companies.
* Small startup that got big. Cashed out.
* Careful about spending, reached retirement age in good shape.
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.
If it makes you feel any better, I did exactly the same thing: failed to exercise my options, lost out on six figures. Not the hugest payday but it would have been life-changing at the time. Such is life.
It would be entertaining[1] to know what proportion of "paper millionaires" in the field do hang on to the money and could retire to the Turks and Caicos. Also what proportion of valley employees become paper millionaires in the first place.
[1] And I mean entertaining because I'm in a bizarrely cynical mood this morning.
You are being too hard on yourself. Your personal history is an extremely recent phenomenon in civilization where there is no guide on what to do simply because virtually no humans have ever been in that scenario. Even today, most people are unfortunately terribly financially illiterate - especially with equity.
> Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions.
This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.
Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.
Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.
You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.
Did you read the article? It's not about most people. The article is about jobs in the Silicon Valley software/tech industry not just jobs in general. Everybody at startups and software companies gets options, and a small but not insignificant percentage of them get rich. The article is about the attitude that if you didn't get rich you must not be any good at your job.
I did. I was replying to the parents comment about not being able to retire early specifically because of bad luck. Not the article directly.
And even based on your comment, I still think that statement sounds wrong to me.
> a small but not insignificant percentage of them get rich.
It happening to a small percentage means it require good luck for it to happen to you, not just the absence of bad luck (which implies it happens to most people unless they have bad luck).
I'll write a longer post about this one day but you bring up a really good point. Identifying the very specific "greed emotion" that makes us make less-secure financial choices I think is a really valuable skill. That's not to say that you should always ignore it -- but it's important to identify it so you can recognize your motivations for making decisions.
I had a similar issue to you a few years back - I was offered a buyout in a partnership that would have put a nice chunk of $ in my pocket, but I (naively) believed that staying in would put more. It fell apart and ended up being worth much less.
I'm not sure I'd have made a _different_ decision, but I certainly have learned to recognize when these moments appear so I can more rationally understand my own decisions.
Anyway - this is all to say, don't sweat it. You've learned, you're lucky to have picked good companies, now take that wisdom and make a less-greedy decision next time.
Me too, I went all in on Apple stock when the iPhone was announced, on margin I was so convinced. Sounds great right? Well broker sold everything during the 2008 meltdown and lost everything.
Sounds like the broker had to sell everything because you went below your required margin ratio. A typical margin ratio is 50%, and AAPL collapsed by more than 50% during the 2008 meltdown, so it sounds like you got margin called.
If that is indeed what happened then that's on you for buying on margin (which is inherently riskier), and no fault of the broker. If that's not what happened, and the broker executed trades without instructions from you, I hope you got them fired at minimum.
Yes, even when making the right (though unnecessarily risky) call an unrelated third party can still show up out of the blue and ruin everything. There are more failure modes to luck than are commonly understood.
It's similar to a bank foreclosing on a house. The borrower pledges something as collateral for a loan, and if things go south, the lender can liquidate the collateral to recover some or all of the debt. It's not correct to say it's done without the borrower's consent because the original lending agreement allows it when the circumstances arise.
Tangentially related: Martingale betting system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)). Aside from its theoretical impossibility, this system typically fails in practice when the gambler hits a house limit and can no longer continue placing bets.
You can only really do that if you have hundreds of millions and can negotiate with a major bank to get it done. Most companies don't trade options until after the lockup, and even if they did, you are restricted from doing so by the contract.
You also have to put up a huge amount of capital upfront to purchase the options. For Mark Cuban, this could be done on credit to the bank, but likely not possible for a single digit millionaire.
It was only during a unique period of irrational exuberance that banks were open to underwriting options for such new and untested equities.
> It was only during a unique period of irrational exuberance that banks were open to underwriting options for such new and untested equities.
Keep in mind that any time a bank underwrites an option, particularly if it’s for a short position, there’s no guarantee they will honor it when shit hits the fan. Legally, they are obligated to. But in practice you may only recieve a percentage of what you were promised.
That wouldn't have helped at all. Marks hedge would have not worked if, say, yahoo tanked for specific reasons such as discovered fraud or something along those lines - where the rest of the tech market was unaffected.
That sounds quite unfortunate for your stock options. But why don't you sell your options, pocket it, and set up an investment portfolio to reduce risk after the first crash?
Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of Elitism if you didn't go to MIT or Harvard, too. I'd like to think more about this and write dome some elegant thoughts, but...
I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way less experience and people applying their hiring "playbook" without much thought. I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.
Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. It's almost as if the tech industry wants most of the people to have two or three years experience.
I've been equating it to working in Hollywood to some.
Still trying to figure out where I went wrong in my career, but as others have said below, not all startups you work for succeed, not all companies you create succeed, lock-up periods, senior executive corruption (I worked for a publicly traded company where the CFO actually went to jail), etc.
> I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.
> Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market.
Which is it? Do you want an older engineer to have the same hiring bar and same compensation or a higher bar and higher compensation?
Realistically, there should be no "same bar, but higher compensation" option. If I'm paying you more, it's because you're better, not because you have more candles on your birthday cake.
My experience on the hiring manager side suggests that when that happens, what's usually going on is that the experienced dev failed to meet the higher (level 3) bar but seemed like they'd be a solid individual contributor at level 2, and therefore received a SWE2/PR2/Foo2 offer.
In other words, "same [lower than they expected] bar, same [lower than they expected] salary" as someone 2-3 years in industry.
The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the teams/projects/products I've lead. Nor are they types of questions that even measure for engineer work experience and how they approach solving the types of real world problems that 10 minutes of white boarding a bit counting and funky array manipulations alg won't show. They are questions that are really catered towards recent grads who that I haven't think about or practice since college, and then not getting the job because of that is strange to me. Especially when they could be asking me interesting real-world technical stuff like on multi-threading, concurrency vs parallelism, performance optimization, more solution architecture are parts of the tech stack, project management, team managements, hiring strategies, dealing with low performers, etc. It's also humorous when companies aren't doing anything technically sophisticated, yet their interviewing like they are, for example doing NLP through third-party APIs, or when the most sophisticated part of their stack is using two caching solutions with Mem-Cache and Redis, or just writing APIs the read/write to and from a couple different data storage, systems, etc.
To clarify about my latest alg test, it's not that these types of problems aren't important to interview, but the candidate could definitely have some input on what they know. For example, if all I've used in my real world professional career are some graphing algs, Dijkstra's variations, and Levenshtein string distance type of stuff, asking me a variation on a bubble sort alg on a New Year's Even line waiting problem out of the blue is going to be brutal and likely not test my real world abilities. You could argue that I could study up on all the old stuff, which I'm doing, but it still feels like a time suck and solidifies that these interviews are skewed to the people who left college more recently.
I haven't interviewed in a long time, though I read interviewing advice from Nick Corcodilos at AskTheHeadhunter and it seems to make sense. The basic idea is to take control of the interview and start doing the work right there in the interview, just like if you were on your first day of the job. Yes, this takes all sorts of social skills and preparation, but it sure would make you stand out from the crowd of software developers. At least the hiring manager should perk up at such a strategy.
This is actually pretty good advice and I applied it as well. Go into an interview prepared for the expected questions (experience, behavioral, etc), but also go in with some well thought out opinions on the day to day work. I’ve found it makes a big difference even if your opinions are on the naive side since you don’t have insider knowledge.
I think the older engineer can do things a lot differently than the younger. Maybe it's that there's so many people with two years dev experience now who are considered Senior level, even though they have little people management and actual team lead experience, and can't appropriate scope project, break them up, mentor people up, etc.?
I'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 despite the fact that I told them well in advance that I have never worked with Ruby.
There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else. There is really only one way to assess someone's ability to write code, and that is to have them write code in a language and environment with which they are already familiar. Modern coding is so complex and requires so much infrastructure that productivity hinges as much or more on the impedance match between a person and their environment as it does on their actual abilities. Even the most brilliant coder will stumble if they use emacs day to day and you force them to use vi.
If you want to assess my ability to come up to speed on a new environment, I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
>I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
In part, because it doesn't really work for most currently employed people and may even be in violation of their employment contract. Where appropriate it can be a good approach, but it probably makes more sense for people who are already consultants/contractors exploring a full-time opportunity.
Thanks for the kind words. It's not just me, I think there are a ton of people like me out there, older, experienced, ready to contribute, but unwilling at this point in their lives to put up with a lot of bullshit. Not wanting to stomp on my humility cred here, but yes, I think the fact that the industry doesn't seem to have figured out an effective way to tap this resource is a big loss all around.
Gig to hire doesn't work if the job market is hot enough that potential employees have full-time job offers in addition to your gig-to-hire offer. I've been able to gig-to-hire for offshore developers, but never for onshore.
I don't know about Silicon Valley but in the UK with contractor rates being what they are, the employee will likely make a hell of a lot more money while on that 6 month contract then they will when they get hired permanently. So it may seem to the employee like they are taking a giant pay cut in order to have a perm position.
> There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else.
I quite liked my Triplebyte interview too (all the better that I could do it with my own Emacs config and in Racket).
> I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
Couldn't agree more; it's just not the traditional way of doing things (maybe because it doesn't scale well). It's a great way of picking a small/medium size company you like the look of, and seeing if you and the company fit together well.
Yes. And I told them up front, during the phone screen, that I had never written a single line of Ruby code, and they said that this was no problem, that they just wanted generally smart people, and that I could climb the Ruby learning curve after I came on board. They specifically told me that all of the coding during the live interview would be in a language of my choice. They even asked me what my preferred environment was.
That particular interview was a complete disaster from beginning to end, and not just because they started out by asking me to debug Ruby code after telling me that they were perfectly OK with me not knowing Ruby.
(And, just for the record, I actually succeeded in finding and fixing the bug.)
It sounds like the problem was not your ability to debug ruby code to but your reaction to them asking you to do it. You almost sound outraged that they dared to ask you to debug some ruby code. A better candidate would have just calmly proceeded to have a go at it while explaining their thought processes to the interviewer, even if they had never coded in ruby or whatever language.
"Outraged" is overstating it, but yes, I was pretty annoyed, but not because they asked me to debug Ruby code. I was annoyed because they lied to me. If they'd just been up front and told me they really were just looking for Ruby programmers I could have told them sorry, I am not your man, and saved everyone a lot of time.
That's a bit of an overstatement, chances are there was a miscommunication and the person interviewing you did not know that you had been told there would be a know ruby questions. Seriously, its just an interview, they're not going to go out of their way to accomodate your every request, just roll with it. Since you were able to debug the ruby code, its sounds like you could have gotten the job if it wasn't for your attitude. IMO the right attitude is more important than raw technical skill, you might pass the "Can he code in ruby?" part of the interview, but fail the "Can he handle things not going his way?" part.
I recently had an interview for a developer job where I was asked lots of devops questions, even though it wasn't a devops-heavy role and I don't have much devops experience listed on my CV. I wasn't able to answer many of the questions but I drew on what little knowledge I did have to try and come up with answers. In the end I got the job because the interviewer said he appreciated how I tried to reason out answers to his questions even without much knowledge in the area. If I would have gotten all annoyed and started acting like I was being lied to and cheated then I doubt I would have gotten the job.
With all due respect I think I'm in a better position to judge that than you are. But there are two things you should know. First, I haven't told you the whole story (and I'm not going to). And second...
> the person interviewing you did not know that you had been told there would be a know [sic] ruby questions
The conversation went something like this:
Him: Welcome, the first thing we want you to do is debug this Ruby code. (Actually, the first thing he wanted me to do was copy-and-paste some shell commands from an unfamiliar text editor into a shell window, but that's another story.)
Me: Um, OK, but I've never worked in Ruby, and I told that to everyone I spoke to on the phone screen because I know you're a Ruby shop.
Him: Yeah, I know. But this is what we want you to do.
Me: OK, I'll give it my best shot, but don't expect too much.
Ok, so that conversation sounds pretty reasonable, you said "OK, I'll give it my best shot, but don't expect too much.", then proceeded to give it a shot and actually succeeded at debugging it. So... whats the problem?
Like I said: the problem is that they lied to me, and as a result they made me waste a day of my life [1]. If I'd known that this was going to happen, I could have either brushed up on my Ruby, or (more likely) cancelled the interview because I would have known ahead of time that I would not be a good fit for their company. There is a reason I've never used Ruby, and it's not that I've never had the chance. I told them that, and they said it would not be a problem. But it was.
[1] Actually, it was only half a day because they cancelled the interview after two hours. Like I said, I have not told you the whole story, and I'm not going to. But the whole thing was a train wreck from beginning to end.
Maybe they were curious about how someone who has never worked with Ruby (but has tons of related experience otherwise) would fare with it. Or, curious how grokkable their particular code is to non-Rubyists.
> There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else
This looks just like an Ad I see on reddit all over the place.
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which specifically ask you not to do this.
If you're worried about abuse, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. The guidelines say that too. Would you mind reading them and following them when posting here?
im not going to create an email to anonymously notify the same site who will review a flagged comment anyway. So, to the process as described, no. I think the comment was timely and relevant, others just disagree about the utility.
for what it’s worth i did triplebyte as well and it was actually a really good interview process. I didn’t end up accepting an offer from any of their companies but I thought they asked very practical things instead of just algorithms.
The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be. Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum.
The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract programmers who moved into management or got out entirely, there’s just not going to be that many.
This is more for y’all youngsters who are afraid you’ll be put out to pasture when you turn $age-you-think-is-old. No reason to think it’ll happen, experience is useful, you’ll be fine.
Yes, you’ll find some ageist managers out there, who won’t hire you if you’ve been legally drinking for more than ten years. Good! You dodged a bullet there, such people invariably have other bad habits.
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 half my age. Younger developers have an astounding short-term memory (or, as my brother likes to phrase it, "they have a much larger register set"). As a simple example, we have 3 environments at work, and at any given moment they're being used for different purposes. I write their purposes down on a scrap of paper to keep it straight, but my twenty-six-year-old pair keeps it in his head.
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.
Make no mistake: picking up new skills can be hard. I remember in '86 when a developer in his 50's turned to me and said, "Brian, I'm tired of learning new things." He really liked to bartend though, so I hope that career worked out for him.
And some developers aren't interested in working anymore (I think this can strike at any age). I remember five years ago pair-programming with a developer my age who wanted to reminisce ("Remember when 640kB was a lot of memory?") and show pictures of his grandkids. I felt bad when they let him go, but it was hard getting work done while I was pairing with him.
> 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 1980s. Agile development processes were just newfangled bullshit to him.
He was hot shit at anything that required fine attention to detail, and implemented a distributed task system after I gave him a verbal thumbnail sketch. Correctly. The first time.
But I could see that his refusal to learn new things was interfering with his career all the same.
> 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.
For example, I find that technical interviews for experienced developers tend to be harder, which makes me infer an "up or out" culture. A dev with 20 years of experience isn't even evaluated for normal individual contributor roles, instead they are chief code wizard or unqualified.
Younger devs, especially college hires, are given more leeway to train on the job and grow into their level of aptitude and interest. A similarly intelligent and driven middle aged dev won't be offered the same chances.
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 this is fair or clever, but this seems to be a part of it.
> 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 something they grok, there's still a mismatch.
Another way of putting this: I've seen people in companies who were considered 'wizards' because they could do everything 'the company way', even though the 'company way' was demonstrable and horrifically both inefficient and insecure. Boat-rockers were not welcomed, regardless of the potential for positive impact.
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.
As mentioned by another commenter, it’s not actually easy to tell in an interview if someone is a “wizard”. And in fact if that someone has experience different from yours, you are even less well equipped to make that determination. It’s a sad irony that the person best equipped to contribute something new to the team is often overlooked exactly because the team doesn’t recognize their differing expertise as valuable.
The only dev I've worked with that I'd elevate to the wizard level... interview was a disaster, it was his first out of college, he was shy, answers were short, etc. We hired him anyways to get favor with his family, figured we would churn him out and keep everyone happy.
Best hire ever! The quiet shy kid could code circles around anyone id met prior.
Oddly he hired someone else with same degree from same well respected school, guy was not even one tenth as useful as the first hire. Third hire from same uni was junk too. That's when I really stopped looking at pedigree or even what degrees the person has, it's never proven to be a great indicator to me.
1.) Average stay in company is 2 years, so whether someone grows wizzard in 10 years is immaterial.
2.) If you are hiring for vague sense that person grows in 10 years, you are extremely likely to be biased for all kind if cultural and demographic signals that have zero with actual performance.
3.) Old are not wizards now, for dame reason why young are not wizards now. Nobody can know everything and wizardly is moving target - half composed of myths and half of smokescreen.
It is not to say that great people don't exist, they absolutely do. But they all have expertise in what they do now and when they change jobs, there is learning curve.
> Nobody can know everything and wizardly is moving target - half composed of myths and half of smokescreen.
These people do exist, though. Just like in any sufficently deep intellectual field, there are people who are very gifted and have insane focus. Compounded over years, they grow to be real beasts, just listen to any talk by John Carmack or Jonathan Blow. The bad news for the employees is that they tend to start their own companies, as typical firms don't have appropriate spots for them (as someone else mentioned, these people provide 10x value but are typically only paid 1.5x-2x).
The other thing is, those 'wizards' typically have deep knowledge, not broad. Would most of either of the two people you mentioned really be all that wizardly at an average web startup?
Sure, a games company or similar, but would Carmack be a 'rockstar' on something like a node.js stack? I'm sure he could pick the tech up quickly, but most of his skills lie elsewhere. And yet there is the expectation in tech that truly experienced people will be good at everything, just look at the post about 'things I don't know' from yesterday to see examples of this expectation.
I mostly agree. Talented people can often demonstrate that talent across a wide range of situations. But it's naive to expect truly world-class expertise developed over decades to be readily transferable to other areas. It's easy to say people should keep their skills up to date. But if your compensation and reputation is based on a deep understanding of a narrow area that took years of experience to create, it's easier said than done to just learn something new and expect to be compensated similarly.
Sure. And they are great in their area of expertise and able to learn new areas too. When they are changing to slightly new area, they look less like wizards unless given benefit of doubt.
But also, they tend to be less of talkers and presenters which is another separate skill. As in, they are rarely public face.
I'm going to assert without evidence that no one in this industry is thinking 3 years out, much less 10. Heck, the chance someone you hire today is going to be working for your company in 10 years approximates 0.
But what are the chances that the college hire who had became the wizard is still in that same company after 10 years? It's ridiculous to hire with that kind of long-term expectations.
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.
> 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?
The vast majority of coders are not and will never be a "wizard". And that's OK. You can still be valuable to a company if you aren't a recent college graduate or a wizard.
Edit: also, be ready to pay through the nose for any actual wizard you want to hire. They can demand bucketloads of money.
My experience over 25 years suggests that wizards can readily command 1.5-2x and deliver beyond 10x. If you can find and engage them, they're one of the best semi-secret bargains in tech.
Unfortunately I might fall in this category. I am a Sr level manager/influencer at a Dow 30. Ex-programmer. Been there 7 years. I just got accepted at kellogg emba. So unless I switch jobs after 1 year I will be this guy.
One of the reason i got stuck is that 3 years into my job; my ex-VPs, who are both CTOs now, asked me to build cloud based eCommerce platform for this top 5 online retailer.
where i was I charge of digital transformation for the entire online space except the infrastructure.
This was 3 year journey. That put it into 6+ year mark.
What do you recommend to handle that? I find it difficult to hire senior developers for junior positions with the salary that goes with it.
The biggest obstacle to middle age workers who are shifting career is to be unable or unwilling to take the paycut and downsides that come with a fresh start.
It's a strong red flag that you are seriously underpaid if the recruiter is insisting on asking for more.
The recruiter has little interest in you being paid more. He's strongly incentivized to push candidates toward the average of the company.
Going over average is risking the company to bail out, too expensive. Going under average is undermining your credibility and leaving commission on the table.
> I find it difficult to hire senior developers for junior positions with the salary that goes with it.
Make the offer. If they turn it down, let them know they can change their minds later.
I always tell engineers looking for jobs that saying "no" is the employer's job. It goes the other way too. Offer the engineer the associate engineer job (or whatever the title is). Let them counteroffer or decide it's a bad fit.
I find it difficult to handle in practice. That requires to adjust the interview and the rating, to conclude that the guy should join as a junior, instead of being rejected.
But there is no shortage of new graduates and juniors with too little experience. What if the company already stopped hiring juniors because they are too many and there are not enough senior to train them? We have no job to offer at that level, it's not about age.
I recommend it at least once a month. I don't know why copying the candidate info to another req should be difficult compared to the rest of the interview and recruiting process.
If you don't have junior level openings, don't offer the job, clearly.
Then the risk is that they take the job, but only for 6-12 months, and then leave just when they're starting to become productive with the new tech and your environment.
Presumably they would ramp up their pay and responsibilities according to their development.
If they're only worth introductory pay and responsibilities 12 months in, let them go take a pay raise elsewhere.
The attitude that pay only goes up incrementally year to year is fairly infounded. The curve should be steeper six months to three years in, depending on you industry and stack.
Organizations should also optimize their tech for onboarding efficiency. I rarely see that enter the discussion other than broadly: "It's easier to find JS developers."
Society in general is pretty hard on older people and it increases with age. Think of the way older women are treated as “grandmas”. They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play.
> Think of the way older women are treated as "grandmas". They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play.
The (American) Jewish term of endearment for a female baby is bubbeleh, which translates roughly as "tiny future grandmother." On the surface it might look like shoehorning, but I think it's meant to be aspirational more than limiting. There may (or may not) be something similar at play here.
I had a specific response to the stereotypical grandma role. I heard it somewhere too long ago to justly represent. But I think it was that grandmothers can be treated like revered figures but generally not taken seriously when they voice concerns or opinions. I wish I had a clearer memory of this point of view...
For men and women it tends to be equal and opposite. Young men are at their lowest social value when young, they're disposable, expected to destroy their bodies to make a living, etc. As they get older their social value goes up. It's the opposite for women whose social value peaks at 18 and declines over the years with a significant drop in the 30s when fertility wanes.
They're the exception that "proves" the rule, really. There's a quote from someone that goes along the lines "Young women are generally the most valued people by society. The people least valued by society are young men." That's probably what the previous comment was rephrasing. I experienced this first hand, as a man, after graduating from college at the start of the great recession and not having any luck finding work for years thereafter.
Having said that, the economy has been very different for this cycle than it was when I was fresh out of college. It clearly varies inside and outside SV, and all the other usual caveats.
I think it really depends on lots of factors. My father joined a startup in the late 90s, after 5-6 yrs the company failed. At 60 he was unable to get a new job. I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time.
I also know from running my own company with partners back in the mid 90s, we were all early 30s except one partner who was 52ish. When getting health insurance for the company his insurance was much more expensive than anyone else's. Maybe that only happens in places like the USA but it registered as yet another reason a company might not want to hire an older person.
What's funny is that many young people in the industry now would never think of staying at one place for 3-5 years cause they don't want to invest the time.
A neighbor of mine is in his 60s and lost his job the same way. He can run rings around anyone I know but he can't find a job or even get an interview.
Bjarne Stroustrup, the C++ creator, wrote a blog post about going for a job interview and being told he "didn't fit the culture" and he knew what that meant.
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 just a formality for any interview I've had in the last 20 years.
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.
You actually have 18 years of experience, making you 40 years of age, and you're listing only the most recent ~10 years. They have no practical means to accurately figure out your age from that resume. The best it can do is slightly help you avoid the first layer of age-based screening.
You shouldn’t list your entire career on your resume, just the past 10-15 years. Also, assuming “18 + length of schooling” is bad too. You’d be way off on my age then too (I graduated HS several years early).
Wow, do you have a link to the blog post? Bjarne, if you read his C++ books, is a great technical communicator and author, and his contribution to computer science speaks for itself.
> I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time.
3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry. The longest I’ve ever held a job is just barely 5 years. Most tech employers— at least the smart ones— know the average bounce rate in the industry is high. Older employees tend to value stability, for various reasons. So I don’t buy your argument.
If there’s a reluctance to hire older devs, I suspect it’s because they have higher salaries and maybe because they are (inaccurately) perceived as being unlikely to know or want to learn new tech.
>3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry.
That's a rather SV-centric view. Otherwise 5-10 years (or longer) is quite normal, including in tech. At many companies, a bunch of 3 year stints for a job candidate is something of a red flag.
I’ve never worked in SV. Only small enterprises, Microsoft, a handful of local startups, and one SV company. The SV company had above average retention compared to most of the non SV places I’ve worked. The 3 year range has been pretty much the norm in my experience (20 years or so). 5 years has been on the high end in every company I’ve worked for. It is anecdotal, but it is what I’ve seen consistently across markets both large and small.
Trust me, it isn't. It's valid for every organization I've ever been in or consulted for (15+). I am in Eastern Europe and spent 9-10 years in offices, and the other 7 after that it has been all remote. I've seen a lot of companies for both consulting and normal 5-to-9 work.
While the reasons why most people don't stick around above 2-3 years are many and varied (and some are frankly quite stupid) to me it does seem to be the norm.
But I'll readily admit we all live in our own bubbles and confirmation biases. So I'm just sharing an additional anecdote here.
Fair enough. I’ve worked mostly in the US Northeast and while I’ve worked in companies across a wide range of sizes my observations are probably flavored by a lot of big firms who have been partners and clients. I would have said 5-10 years was more the norm among people I work with but then I probably tend to disproportionately work with people who are more senior in their organizations.
The neighbor I mention in my other post told me he'd work for $30K if they offered insurance and he'd stay for at least five years. As a software engineer, I know he can run code rings around anyone.
Yes, the salary requirements thing isn't very convincing to me. At the end of the day a low salary is better than no salary. Also people approaching their sixties will have most likely paid off their mortgage and their children will have left home.
Shhhh, you’re busting the narrative. But seriously, I’ve worked with some amazing older engineers. I’ve always had great relationships with them, and I’ve learned so much from those kinds of people. In my experience many older engineers are much more chilled out and willing to give their time to help others.
Same here. I must say, in my work experience, I had problems only with engineers as young as me (or around my age) who had a big ego, a very bad personality or the I-am-very-smart syndrome.
Instead usually the "old" engineers who stick in a tech position were always extremely humble even if having a ton of domain and company-specific knowledge with the willingness to share all of it.
Yeah. I’m very lucky to have worked with quite a few of them. I’m definitely better off for it. I’d try to spend as much time as I could talking with them.
Even now that I’ve been working in senior positions for years, I’m still just as grateful that I get to work with people who know a lot more about stuff than I do.
To be honest, you're probably on to something. Outside the tech hubs, older workers are common (and if you don't want to work those 80 hour weeks, you probably want to be outside the tech hubs, although you likely also won't strike it rich).
And if (career, area) is 80% under 30, any given company is mostly under 30, and naturally they're going to want to hire under-30s.
Luck is a huge part of success. It's mythology that if you work hard enough for long enough that the world will become your oyster. Sweat and ingenuity are often necessary but not necessarily sufficient means to financial gain. No one launches from the same starting line nor runs along the same track. And don't forget that all the other smart folks out there are ravenously competing against you for those hotly desired greenbacks. Count your blessings if you are one of the lucky ones.
The sad reality is, no matter how irrational is, people don't want to be around someone who is considered unlucky. Especially at a startup. I don't agree with this at all, but I'm saying it because I don't want to pretend that that psychological influence doesn't exist.
I've never seen anybody that had a "lucky" or "unlucky" reputation. Some people are considered to "have been lucky" at some point in time, but nobody considered to have a "luck" or "non-luck" trait.
In other words, I've never observed what you describe, never even heard of it
A quick google search "are some people lucky" will show that people very much believe in luck as a trait. Like I said, it's irrational, but people believe in it. It's a placeholder for someone who succeeds or fails abnormally, without a visible cause.
Consider this: You're working at a startup that is struggling, and you're interviewing a candidate whose last 5 startups they worked at folded within 6 months of them being hired. As rational as people try to be, there would be a back-of-the-mind superstition that hiring that person would be bad luck.
There are many people involved in influencing the process to hire someone, and as I'm sure you know, many people vote "no" for the most seemingly inconsequential reasons. As superstitious as "bad luck" is, like I stated in my earlier post, it's a placeholder/heuristic for abnormal amounts of failure without a clear cause.
I don't think it's down to bad luck, but it's the fact that there is an undeniable correlation between being a good dev at a startup and that startup succeeding. It's obviously not the strongest correlation, but it's there. If you have two developers, each about equal, and one was a member of a startup that did well, and one wasn't, it's obvious where the chips are going to fall. I don't think anyone calls that luck, even if they probably should at least be aware it could be bad luck.
For the sole purpose of giving a friendly stranger on the internet a "worlds first" :)
I've been told a past boss, verbatim, "Wow, you have shit luck." The tl;dr is that I was working for a university and thus hired "as a college hire." and post-hire the corp had no easy way to rectify this, leading to a permanently set-back promotion track. A series of compounding misunderstandings on this led to this remarkable conversation with such other kernels as "you're kinda screwed, maybe they could fix it on rehire."
That's the tip of the iceberg though, to say I've had a "colorful" life is an understatement, and while I enjoy the bar stories I get to tell, there's certainly a perception that I'm unlucky.
E.g. During schooling I was placed in a random rooming arrangement with a violent drug addict, who later was deported after multiple arrests for beating his girlfriend; but this was after ~ a year of the school covering it up, throwing out his drugs before police showed up, and saying that my attestations weren't worth pursuing further.
I realize that got dark fast but I mean to bring it up to say, who the hell has these sorts of stories. It's like a sitcom. Even looking in on myself it seems absurd, so I can understand why people call it "luck."
To bring this back to the crux of the discussion, I'd use it to say I certainly see some vestige of "luck" in that certain things happen randomly, ala my room assignment, and you may have gotten the good flip on a few key ones; and thus the GP's point is very well taken. I also agree with GP's direct child, although it makes me sad, since I think my "bad luck" has given me exposure to quite a range of experience, one does get strange looks from being repeatedly perceived as the recipient of "bad luck". ("Oh maybe there's something he's not telling us, maybe he's the common cause, etc")
It's not about working hard, and never was. It's about working smart.
And people make their own luck. You can't get lucky if you're not in the game swinging.
I've known plenty of people who just sat at their desks, doing as little as possible, waiting for the boss to direct them, reading hackernews(!), watching the clock till they could go home. They were never going to get lucky.
Then there are the ones who are always up to something. They're doing a side project, they started a band, they go to meetups, they write articles, they talk about their investment strategies, they're planning out their next venture, and you know they're going to get lucky.
There’s nothing wrong with being a salaried person, there’s nothing actually wrong with trying to make a decent buck so that you can have a roof on top of your head and a computer with access to the internet so you can read HN daily. I work so that I can read HN (among other myriad things that I enjoy doing), I don’t read HN so that I can get more money so that I can do... I don’t know what exactly should I be doing other than reading HN and the myriad other things I just mentioned that I liked.
“Investing” is hard and very risky work that offers almost no intellectual benefits (and I’m pretty sure the index-tracking bubble will burst and create a bigger mess than what happened back in 2008), I’d much rather spend my time mapping the Byzantine coins found over the Northern Balkans (a nice way to re-create regional trade routes from about 1000 years ago) or being undecided whether the people who put the Indo-European “urheimat” just North of the Black Sea were right or wrong (does Anatolia make for a better choice?). There’s nothing wrong with holding an ok job that pays the bills so you can pursuit your real intellectual interests.
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 and hard, you won't get the results you worked for.
If after all that happened in the last couple years you still think this country rewards effort and smarts fairly then you live in Lala land, not in the USA.
I wish more people on this site would refrain from chucking crap arguments against a wall hoping they’ll stick. It’s exhausting to have to constantly point out invalid arguments to people who can’t be bothered to take responsibility for their intellectual pollution.
> the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.
If we accept this definition, and the United States scores poorly, then it means that either:
* not all people are treated as equal
* or not all people have equal rights
* or not all people have equal opportunities
Could you please clarify how your comment is relevant as a response to a comment about egalitarianism?
Stated differently: if your comment is true, what is the implication?
Despite a distinct lack of egalatarianism, the US remains the place where someone born at the bottom can still climb the social ladder. Billionaire-hood may escape them, but they're not doomed.
The US is now one of the countries where your success in life is most fully determined by your family background.
e.g. it's in the bottom third of the OECD for income mobility, and the absolute worst in the OECD for how much your family background determines your educational success
Let me tell you a story of two families. My step-dad was thrust into a parenting role over his siblings, a sister and a brother at an early age. The brother died early, in a train accident. My step-dad married my mother and they're still together, over 20 years later. His sister is on her second marriage.
My aunt's family is constantly teetering on the edge of poverty, having obliterated their family's nest egg over decades of stupid decisions. Our family clawed our way out of low class through pragmatic saving.
Stupid decisions are what make the difference between affluence and poverty in the US. You can have all the money in the world and still be broke. The capacity to make stupid decisions largely comes from childhood. It's the emotional makeup of a household that mostly determines what children are like when they get older. If you grow up in America feeling neglected and abused, you're going to go through strings of bad relationships and that's just going to be your life.
I call America's brand of poverty "emotional poverty." Food on the table, roof over your head, cable TV and video games for entertainment, all things people in other parts of the world can't reliably have, in the US pretty much come out of the tap like water. Even homeless people here have cell phones.
No, what's missing here is emotional warmth. People in the US just can't figure out for some reason how to treat each other well. They eat, but they don't live.
If you're lucky enough to avoid emotional poverty, then you can join America's middle class. If not, you'll fritter away all the money you ever make. It's got nothing to do with how much money your family has and everything to do with how they treat each other.
1. This reply seems like "forget hard data, here are two anecdotes" which seems like a poor approach if you're trying to convince [good] engineers.
2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless.
3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.
1. If engineers don't value stories as valid for exploring and explaining reality, then they'll be doomed to lamp posting forever.
2. You're just making my point for me.
3. The access to secondary education that Americans have in is unparalleled anywhere else except in certain parts of Europe. It's been our collective obsession for decades, the subject of intense policy initiatives all over the nation. There's no political will to improve prisons, but an initiative to expand student loan funding will always be approved.
Anybody can take on $X0,000 in uncancelable debt to obtain a college degree with. The reason they can't follow through and actually improve their lives with it runs along emotional poverty lines. We can't educate our way out of this problem.
Re: #1 the original statistics presented show that in the US, there's a stronger correlation between individual income and parental income than in most OECD countries. You've claimed this is "measuring the wrong thing" but it isn't clear to me why you think that, or what we should be measuring instead.
Re: #3 The real inequality of opportunity isn't in secondary education, it's in primary (K-12) education. I went to a public highschool in a well-off suburb that had high participation in AP programs and sent the overwhelming majority of the student body to college. A couple of miles away in the city, the high school struggled to retrain accreditation.
A very strange aside in my eyes. You almost don't touch the topic at hand.
Sure you can claw your way out by being financially wise. I just did that this year after life hit me really hard, several times, at my weakest hours. Took me 7 months to recover and I am pretty sure I know exactly what you mean by it.
Still, this piques. Yes you can have a decent way of life -- food, own home (increasingly rare), internet, a few vacations a year perhaps. But outside of that? Real middle class? Call me biased but I am not seeing it anywhere. Even the people who believe to live a middle-class life cannot afford more than 2-3 months of unpaid vacation (or a hiatus).
I absolutely positively cannot spend 2-3 years doing only the hobby projects I have in mind without caring about money. I simply am not at the level of a CEO pay + bonuses that enable such a lifestyle, and won't ever be if I continue to be a programmer for hire.
To me "middle class" means "able to freely switch jobs or professions without any financial pressure", combined with "able to enjoy leisure time as much as they like". But again, maybe I am describing the "rich life" and not the middle class. Perhaps we use different terms?
(Eating but also living the life is something money can enable -- but I agree that money alone cannot teach you that.)
I agree with this thoughts very much. The attitude you mention is key, at least in my reduced and anecdotical experience. It is true, however, as others say, that you have to start from a reasonable and relative good baseline and that part is just pure luck.
Absolutely... adults don't/shouldn't play the blame game, just pointing out that in all fairness not everyone starts from the same point, but this is not really related to the main point beeing discussed anyway.
"... doing a side project, they started a band, they go to meetups, they write articles, they talk about their investment strategies, they're planning out their next venture,..."
You mean funding them? I sort of have done that, though probably not in ways you would recognize easily. Unfortunately it would be too private to expand on this here.
I have always been curious about how this works or how people decide whom to fund -- or whose ideas they find interesting. Do you mind a private message?
I regret my reply that sounds a lot like I'm some sort of secret donor. Instead, I work with diverse political projects. They have in common that they don't use money transactions in specific situations where others would. It's interesting to see what happens when money as motivator is removed.
Sometimes I'm a technician, sometimes I help organize, sometimes I'm the legal front. And some projects I do fund, but not to a degree that anybody's livelihood depended on me.
And I am sorry if it sounded like I am fishing for sponsorship. Not at all!
I am simply very much interested in the dynamics of the process. I would like to know how do people get together to discuss such things in the first place, for example.
Apologies if I projected the wrong message before.
Haha no worries you didn't project that. At least not to me. I just tought my response came across as if I was a big benefactor.
As for how I found the projects to engage in: I got asked for tech help, went to a meeting, and found people that had unusual takes on reality. I went with those who were doing stuff, as opposed to those discussing how it ought to be. I don't have much initiative myself and prefer working with people who have that drive.
life is statistics. The more at bats you get, the more likely one of them will be a home run. Tenacity, hard work, risk tolerance, and good decision making give you more at bats.
There is a second path too which is slow and steady wins the race. If you live well below your means and invest your money you will also end up with enough money that you don't need to work. My wife's private school just got a $3M donation from their janitor of 50 years when he passed away. If you save 30-40% of your pre tax income, then you will be able to retire at a reasonably young age, with a very high probability.
If one thinks 35+ is to old to code, well I have news for you. At 35+ you learn how to manage time and prioritize better. Life throws another ranch in your bucket of problems, marriage and children. When you are young, you are hired as an engineer to work 40 hours, which we all know very well that working for startups that means 80 hours or you are not putting good effort. Well with a family that’s not possible, as you know that 40 hours at work means that exactly. The rest of the 40 hours are meant to be spent taking care of your family.
So if one more recruiter doesnt offer the job interview, it’s because they don’t understand what life is all about. If you have no time to socialize and network or raise a good family, soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people. Talent is not born, talent is made and it starts with a good foundation, called FAMILY.
The distinction between valley culture and everywhere else is never made in these pieces which is a pity. I work in fortune 500s and we’re all 40+ in these companies. I rarely see 20s.
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 paycheck to paycheck but I couldn't retire yet.
> 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
That's the problem. Salaries on job hunting sites are wildly inaccurate. Glassdoor lists FANG compensation as 2-3x less than what they actually pay.
Also, the important metric isn't COL adjusted income; it's the total amount of money that's left over to save/invest after all other expenses. So it doesn't matter that CA has high income tax or that rent costs $50k per year when you're still able to save significantly more than anywhere else in the U.S.
I made the move to the Bay Area with a family in my 30s. It’s not perfect, but we’re saving dramatically more than we could anywhere else. I don’t know how long we’ll stay, but at this rate 5 years would be enough to set us up really well almost anywhere else in the US.
I wish I’d gotten into software sooner. If you come out here at 22, live with roommates and stay until you’re 30, you probably take anywhere from $400-700k in savings with you to then have a much easier life somewhere else.
That’s why people do it, especially when they’re young.
Also in terms of math, you need to know that the big companies here pay about 50% via salary and the rest via bonus and stock, so the salary numbers you see are only the “live day to day” money. The other half of your income comes in big checks every quarter or so, which makes it easy to shovel that straight into savings.
Private, quiet space is a visceral need for some people and a frivolous luxury for others. In my experience it's very difficult for the people in these two groups to understand each other. A craving for solitude is an expensive trait, but one I have no qualms about indulging: after spending all day in a giant open floorplan and then commuting on a crush-loaded train, if there were Craigslist strangers in my home I'd be in hell.
It's better than spending your life as a young adult working degrading jobs and starving. In the broad scheme of things, being a programmer is not so bad.
Living in San Francisco, working at a big 5 tech company really isn't that bad. Even the "worst" of the bunch on the work life balance scale, only do around 60 hours a week. Most of them just do the standard 40 hrs a week, though.
So it really isn't giving up your youth or anything. And many young people even enjoy the city of San Francisco. It is a big city. Lots of stuff for young people to do...
Living with roommates by choice isn’t that bad. Needing to live with roommates for financial reasons when one really would rather have a private space to come home to is hell.
1) You don’t aspire to own a home here, as that will eat easily 100% or more of your savings.
2) You plan to spend your savings in a cheaper place.
USD is a convenient shorthand for purchasing power, but breaks down under huge regional COL differences. A $200k savings account in the Bay Area is like a $50k savings account elsewhere: about enough to think about setting up a middle-class grown-up lifestyle.
Unless you're talking about a home, 200k in the bay is more than 50k almost anywhere else. There are very few things that cost 4x more on regional differences, and housing may actually be the only one. (Other major expenses, like food, transit/gas, and leisure activities like travel or vacations are much less price elastic, 0-30% more)
Not really. 200k is a down payment on a million dollar home. Double that is a 2 million dollar home, which will let you buy in most places.
Thats achievable in 5 years for someone who is working towards that goal specifically, less if you have a partner who also works. Anecdotally, I know two couples (out of not many total) that purchased within 2 years of moving to the bay. One had some savings, and that plus the first years stock vests was enough for a down payment on a condo. The other took ~2 years to buy a home from very little prior savings, which was possible because both had decent incomes.
So I'm dubious as to the doom and gloom, at least for married professionals.
(Of course, this ignores the reality that for anyone not working in tech or 1-2 other fields, these are wholly out of the picture, and that's hugely problematic! But for the calculation of CoL for someone who is picking between tech companies, I think people overestimate the costs of the bay, and I'm not really sure why)
Sure, dual tech income families are doing fine. But with gender ratios as they are, not many of those can exist.
Remember that, as you save, housing appreciates. I've run the numbers; the lines only intersect at all for more conservative % increases, between 8 and 12 years out.
Both good points that I forgot to mention. I implicitly assumed most people would eventually move away from SV, but if you plan to stay there your whole life, then you'll have a much more difficult time buying a home and/or retiring. And having children adds a whole new dimension of financial difficulties.
It also adds a bunch of social difficulties, unless you try to pull of the entire make-bank/move-elsewhere cycle before they reach elementary school age. Once they are in school, they start making their own friendships and relationships, and it becomes much more impactful for everyone to make that move to the new low-cost area, leaving everything they know behind.
If you're able to save 10% of your salary for retirement, you're a lot better off in raw dollar amount to work in SV and then move elsewhere at retirement.
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.
The last person I knew who managed thousands of people hit that after 7 years. It's not the norm, but it happens.
And with 15 years of experience I was being groomed to be promoted from an L6 to L7 "Uber Team Lead"... it wasn't easy and wasn't coasting, took a ton of very hard very impactful work... but it's possible for a mere mortal.
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.
Google, Facebook, Netflix, Linkedin, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc. typically^H^H^H often pay $400-500k for someone with that much experience who can be a team lead.
If you can be a more senior architect-type person, or a manager who manages managers, 7 figures can be within reach (though not easy).
This is why you're losing coders to Silicon Valley. If you want a big house, then yeah, that will be $2M and you might be better off making $150k in the midwest. If you're happy with a two bedroom apartment for $4k-$5k/mo, there is no place better.
I think you don't understand the math here. If you are in your 20s, single, and making six figures, you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent and it's quite nice because you have so much extra capital to spend on top of saving.
And there are things to spend it on here. Heck many in their thirties do this.
> Meanwhile in the south you can make those same six figures and have a 5 bedroom house with a mortgage of 1.5k
Or in my case, a 5 bedroom house with a mortgage of $850.
We paid ~$125k for ours, in a semi-rural area, last year.
It blows my mind that people would prefer to live in the Valley or elsewhere. I put in my five years in a higher COL area (Charlottesville, VA) to build my earning potential - and then I moved back to where I grew up as soon as I was confident that I could hold down a well-paying remote dev position and could get another one if the need arose.
The disparity between the coasts and "middle America" is insane. Working for a company based in the LA area, I make literally 2-3x what my colleagues are making working for local companies - while my employer pays me probably around half of what they'd have to pay for similar talent local to them.
Very few people in the South are making 6 figs out of college, even fewer are able to save six figures a year out of college. People in the bay can do that.
And that assumes you want a 5 bedroom house, I have zero interest in that right now. Too much space to take care of. Why would I do that?
And why would I go somewhere with fewer things to do. I attend social events 2-3 times a week. I've checked elsewhere, that would drop to 2x a month in Atlanta and less in a less populated area, unless I picked up more hobbies.
What social events do you enjoy that you don’t classify as hobbies? Eg what social events does sv have that Atlanta doesn’t? Are you counting tech as all encompassing lifestyle?
They are hobbies, my point is just that currently my hobbies (social dance, among others) have a large enough presence that I could literally attend a different social partner dance event every night of the week while sticking to blues and swing. I'd be double booked most nights. Now I don't do that because they're spread all over the bay (SF, Oakland, mid peninsula and South Bay, hell there's even one in Sacramento), but there are enough close to me that I can do 2-3 a week no issue.
In Atlanta theres a couple things a month. Anywhere super rural that isn't a college town, I'd be lucky to find dance partners my age.
I'd maybe pick up other hobbies again (I used to play magic the gathering but stopped in college, FNM is in a lot of places), but it's not the same.
> Meanwhile in the south you can make those same six figures
This isn't true in the slightest. You can easily make double or more in a top tier tech city like SF/SV as you can in the south. My salary is about 7X higher than when I first started in tech over a decade ago at a smaller IT consulting firm (and note that my starting salary was decent for the area, not horribly low-balled). There's no way that would have happened had I stayed where I was instead of moving to a top tier tech city offering the highest salaries.
I'm saving twice as much per year as the average developer in the country makes. That's definitely not possible in the south.
Sure it does. For one, they're taking home an extra thousand dollars per week in SV even after all the taxes. Also, they don't have to live in Birmingham, AL or whatever the hell.
There are some attractive things to some people about living in Birmingham, or abouts.
Your hell hole is other people's heaven; navigable traffic, lakes galore, proximity to clear, warm, clear oceans. Backyards with trees, playsets, green grass.
I would so have a full fab and electronics shop by now if I lived in a place like birmingham.
Last year for thanksgiving we were in Knoxville. Was looking at abandoned warehouses that I could flip. Downtown is tiny but nice and supplemented by the university. I’d have to take up rooting for the vols tho.
I will say the traffic along the main highway and series of strip malls is not fun though. Nor is the lack of any mass transit to the airport. However rental cars are dirt cheap there.
I was LUSTING over this place though (https://www.google.com/maps/@35.9679553,-83.9199396,3a,60y,4...) was for sale at $2.2M when I was there last year. If only I could sell my house for 2x and I could think of a business to keep that place maintained would be about as dream of a place as I can think of.
Not having to live in SFBA is worth much more than that to quite a few people. In my calculus, it'd be at least $15K a month for me to even think about moving back to SV.
and what would you do with all of that space? In the bay, I am living a bit far out (25 minutes) and tradeoff for a bit more space - but I'm also going out to social events 3-4 times a week. I would not be doing that anywhere else, heck when I was living in DC I only managed 1-2 events a week unless i tried really hard.
Some people prefer saving and looking for other forms of stimulus other than the acquisition of space. For those of us, the fear of living "some place in the south" amounts to:
"The cells just say, 'that's it', and you, the unwary victim of cellular ennui, are quite literally bored to death."
Right, but then you’re in the south, which is why the cost of living is cheaper — it’s not as desirable. And if you’re a marginalized group, it’s not going to be a pleasant place to live.
I lived with roommates until 30. It was fun, it was cheap, and I was able to save a ton in a very short time which allowed me to have a sizable down payment on a house.
Almost nobody who can afford it chooses to live with roommates after college. People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably. Professionals do it in cities like San Francisco and New York because early-career professionals in those cities are financially distressed relative to property owners in those cities.
There are many young software engineers working at Google/Facebook who would be able to save significantly more than the median US household income per year while renting their own place but still choose to live with roommates.
You stated: “People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably.”
This is false for software engineers in the Bay Area. Can they save more by living with roommates? Sure.
But they wouldn’t be “financially distressed” or “unable to save money comfortably” if they didn’t - that is easily verified by looking up new grad salaries and rents in the Bay Area.
It’s simply a rational decision - these are people who were living with roommates in college and by continuing that arrangement can save more, live in a better location w/ more amenities, and quite often share a place with friends - win/win/win.
> It’s simply a rational decision - these are people who were living with roommates in college and by continuing that arrangement can save more, live in a better location w/ more amenities, and quite often share a place with friends - win/win/win.
That's true everywhere. Yet the overwhelming majority choose not to have roommates.
There's selection bias in your analysis. People who are attracted to big cities are more likely to enjoy the company of living with other people, and vice versa.
yeah i don't agree with this. i live alone and spend about the same or a bit more as my friends who live with roommates. they have nicer apartments generally but it's a choice thing in our city (NYC). this is people in early-mid 20s working at faang/banking/consulting.
> And when you do see a 20-something, they're often kind of sketchy,
That’s not true at all and comes off as elitist. I’ve worked at dozens of Fortune 500 offices for my company, and met some truly talented young (20’s) engineers all over the world. Many don’t want to live in SV, many can’t move because of family, or friends.
I'm 34, left my 7 years relation two years ago, am gay and never thought I could have kids and am not planning on having kids any time soon. This kind of thinking about that the traits that one develops with age and experience only come about with raising a family kind of worries me, I have a pretty good idea on what I'm missing on since absolutely all my good friends from university and most of my close friends from my past two gigs are raising kids. I just don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it. I also think I can manage time and prioritize better because life did throw stuff at me, just not marriage and children.
Also, if I feel like it, I can work 80 hour weeks. I just need to rest after doing it and can't sustain it for too long. I don't know if I can't sustain it for too long "because of age", or if because of experience I do now realize I'm doing everything wrong because of burnout, and when I was young I just powered through doing wrong shit when I was stressed out or sleep deprived and didn't asses I was doing wrong shit.
I've heard this before, but there is something to be said about the difference between someone having kids at the start of their careers when they have little to no savings, and several years (hell, a decade) into their careers when they have high paying jobs with good stay-at-home policy, lots of money in the bank, perhaps a house.
I grew up in situation 1 (teen pregnancy) and it is fascinating to talk with my friends about the different environments we grew up in and the different issues (mentally or financially) we face based on that simple comparison.
Its funny how much life is staked against with a family. especially if one or both of you don't have a college degree. school hours aren't set up for jobs. A lot of companies don't tolerate sick kids. daycare is beyond expensive. health care for families is just impossible. Most people don't have enough savings to make a dent.
My time as a teacher as well as my own studies have convinced me that moving away from the village model was a mistake - children in groups easily self regulate and self educate given minimal direction from a teacher (and powerful guidelines for timeboxed schedules), a role easily filled by the "wisest" in a group (the elderly).
Somewhat contradictorily, it's far easier to manage, teach, and set straight (punish/reward) 15 kids than it is 2. You have to be a falcon for bullying though - spot it from ten miles away and strike it at 100 miles an hour.
Irritating attitude and assumptions. Even the wording of "being ready for it" is ignorant. There are many, many successful people who do not have or do not want or will not ever want children.
My apologies, I didn't intend to suggest anything like people with no intention of having children are simply "pre-kid" until they come to their senses.
I'm straight and similarly aged. don't worry about expectations, but if you do, at least keep in mind you're not alone! it's enough work to make things work for yourself, let alone worry about how the rest of the world does it...
I'm in a similar position. I think the parenthood decision should be discussed much more seriously. Society does itself a disservice every time it erects expectations on people solely by sex, age, race, etc.
Unfortunately these kinds of shitty recruiters and companies will always be around - none of them are thinking about lofty societal goods like family or what happens 40 years later, they are thinking about how to get the most work for the lowest price for their company. As long as droves of young people continue to flock to tech to try and get their share of the money, hiring is a buyers market. Throwing out old people or young people who dare to demand work-life balance will remain a viable strategy for the buyers and many will do just that.
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.
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.
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 make sense to leave.
> soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people
I fear we are well on our way to this type of society. "Learning" is a virtue. You'll hear many people say, "I like learning," or some other version of this cliche. It reminds me of this idea, and it makes me cringe, partly because of the robotic aspect and partly because it means they've chosen self-focus and self-improvement over helping others. They've chosen this in terms of priorities well ahead of mentorship, at least to the point where they'll say it out loud.
> partly because it means they've chosen self-focus and self-improvement over helping others
There's balance to be had here. You have to take care of yourself to help others more effectively. In case of learning, the less you know, the less you can give to the next generation.
Not necessarily. One of the things you 'learn' with age is that you can get way more done by helping other people learn what to do than doing it yourself. It's a style of leadership that stresses building a nurturing environment for talent.
I love mentorship, but I don't feel like I'm in a position to mentor anyone. Learning enough to be able to spread my knowledge (or the beneficial application thereof) is the core reason why I want to improve. I know that the more I improve, the more I can help others with what I've learned. Is it possible to have useful mentorship without a focus on self-improvement as well?
I think ageism even has an impact on this generation. The quality of software produced is much lower than it could be because we mostly have young guys doing all the work. Ageism is also why we repeat of trends every generation. Our industry simply has no memory.
You can have a senior programmer in their 30s and a junior programmer in their 50s, if the latter is a career-changer fresh out of a coding bootcamp, or with a couple of MOOCs under their belt. Age is often correlated with seniority, but correlation is not causation...
I understand. But typically some one out of college or took a boot camp even needs that amount of time so many are in their 30s. The 50 year is a rarer case.
"If you have no time to socialize and network or raise a good family, soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people."
I suspect that there is no "bettering themselves" going on in that scenario. That only happens if you close the loop. Running open loop is just a random walk into crazy-town.
Additionally, people over 35 start gaining a better perspective on systems. It's not just experience, your brain actually changes and you see things differently. So, while you might not switch windows or pump out lines of code as quickly as a younger person, you might be able to design better systems and write less code overall, because you will know what is really necessary.
Very well-said! Wouldn't it be nice if we knew going in which companies understand this? I'd like to see more companies state these ideas explicitly in their values.
> Sounds discriminatory against ppl who don't have kids and are over 40.
The economy ceases to exist if, in the long run, couples don't have at least 2.1 kids on average. People are free to not have kids, of course, but having them serves an essential social function and it's not "discriminatory" to have values that accommodate that.
So what does that value imply about ppl without kids? That they should be putting more hours in or have less flexible schedules?
Why not have resonable work schedules for everyone, children or not. I just dont' get why employers have to come up with discriminatory policies for the 'good of the economy'. I would rather support a transparent 'tax childess ppl more' govt policies that these insidious "values". Whatever happened to the value that your employer shouldn't care what you do outside of work.
Employers are part of society and have to accommodate peoples' human functions. Requiring employers to make bathrooms available and giving bathroom breaks is reasonable, as is requiring employers to provide say parental leave (even if childless people can't use it). Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing--expecting people to regularly be in the office after typical daycare closing times is a bad thing to do.
> requiring employers to provide say parental leave
You pivoted into govt laws on employers. That is not what we are discussing here though, I was referring to "values" that employers come up with voluntarily. I don't have any issues with clearly laid out govt policies.
> Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing
I don't disagree with this as long as everyone can use this flexibility.
By "requiring" I mean in terms of social expectations, not government laws. Many policies, e.g. lunch breaks, are "required" by social norms, not law. (Only a minority of states require lunch breaks; bathroom breaks are not required for the most part either: https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/labor-employment/b/...) E.g. Most tech companies offer far more than the minimum FMLA required leave. That reflects "'values' that employers come up with voluntarily." That's also based on social expectations--a tech company that only offered the legally required minimum leave would get a lot of bad publicity for violating social norms, even though it would be legal to do so. Finally, it's not "discriminatory" even though childless people can't take advantage of such leave.
Raising children is a service to society. That doesn't mean the childless should be discriminated against, but it does mean families should be accommodated. Giving a parent more flexibility than a non-parent is not discrimination, it is accommodation, and it's for the good of us all. The childless clearly benefit from healthy families.
I think you might have misunderstood the suggestion. Giving people enough time to manage a family is different from giving more time to people who have families.
An employer might prefer having employees with children for a variety of reason and mostly would treat "family benefits" as method to hire older more experienced people.
> it's illegal to even ask if people have children in interviews.
This is to avoid so discriminate against people without children, an objectively right objective.
Still you can accommodate the needs of people with children as a sort of "levelling the field". The same way you can accommodate the needs of minorities by making sure that office culture is respectful of their identities.
If I can go a bit off-topic in both cases the specific demography you are trying to help might be just an example of a common human trait that is just easier to see in some people. Sometimes single men want to work part-time and white rich people do not like racist jokes.
I agree with you but if a startup really wants people working 80 hours a week, then a family man who wants to work 40 hrs isn't a good match for the firm.
"A startup that really wants people working 80 hours a week" sounds like the most US thing I've heard/read this month.
The US work culture is utterly insane. They say that the Japanese work extreme long hours, but from my experience, it's quite similar for big cities in the US.
Sounds like a sure way to a burnout, getting fat, and losing your family.
I wonder if I'm just a lousy human being, or are these startups full of cheats. For me, working 25-30 hours a week (really working, not pretending to work or sitting disengaged in meetings) is probably a long-term maximum of sustainable effort. How the hell are these people working 80 hours a week?
They're not. I've done maybe a dozen genuine 80 hour workweeks in my 30 years since high school. Maybe. At least half of those were in college.
People who claim to be regularly working 80 hours a week are often over-counting ("I can't remember doing anything but sleeping and working last Monday, so I must have been working 16 hours.") and often not actually working during 30-75% of the time they're ostensibly at work. Walk by the random colleague at a random time and note how much time their screen has code on it vs Facebook, YouTube, or an online shopping site. Sure, they might be studying an online course on YouTube or buying a critical piece of lab equipment for work, but more than likely they are just dicking off about half the time.
in my experience a lot of the younger people spend a lot of the day at work messing around. (socializing etc). they also come in for breakfast and dinner and go to the gym. and then stay late working since they didn’t get much work done during the day. If you naively count the hours spent at the office it does indeed add up to 80
I prototyped something for a startup I was working on, and put in about 80-100 hours a week for three months. That was probably the most I could have managed. I went a bit crazy. My dreams got weird.
Sailing the world sounds boring. It's too passive. I'll be working creating new things until they carry me out in a box.
I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work.
I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoyed the crew by complaining that they'd changed course to avoid a storm.
Must have been a strange sailboat to have an engine room :-)
Sailing the world certainly isn’t a passive activity, especially if you’re sailing around the world. Ocean sailing involves all sorts of skills (and nerves) as you need to nurse a boat around while using your ingenuity to solve the challenges of things breaking that you can’t replace for weeks. You need to prepare all the food (victualling), learn how to sew sails and teach yourself to sleep immediately while tied to a bed healed over sideways because you’re being knocked about in a storm beating into the waves...because you’ll need to be back up top for your shift in 3 hours time.
I understand that sailing on the ocean is no small feat, but my problem with it is it doesn't actually accomplish anything. I want to do things that matter.
This may be jarring to learn but we all enter the world naked, terrified, and alone, and fairly shortly thereafter leave the world the same way.
An individual might find meaning from travel, or meditation, or religious adherence, another from creating a family, another by being the greatest bullfighter to ever live, or creating an electronic simulation of violent war, but in none of these examples should anyone be incredibly confident that they have become an authority on which things matter more than others.
A cruise ship is basically a floating hotel. Depending on the severity of the storm, the crew probably did not want to be dealing with a significant number of sea-sick guests.
It used to be possible to take a berth on a cargo ship to/from Liverpool from/to Halifax. The modern equivalent is a ride on a container ship [1]. They will still avoid really bad storms but you are more likely to see some seas around autumn.
I did a feeder-ship from Rotterdam. While it was interesting to see the logistics and tight schedules, next time I would skip a run and stay at the destination for more than the day it took them to exchange containers.
I am the opposite. I love to cruise, my wife and I have been on 23, many for long duration.
I like to write and getting coffee at 5am, taking a walk around the ship (outside weather permitting), and then a couple of hours working on a book project in the ship library is a great way to start the day and sets me up for exploring a new port later in the day or reading a good book and enjoying the ocean if it is a sea day. Then at night a fine dinner and a good show. A nice life, and it doesn’t have to be all idle time.
Another aspect I didn't enjoy was being a "guest", which means being treated like a retarded person. It's not the crew's fault, they have to do that because they get a lot of guests that sue when the guests do something stupid. But I don't really care for it.
I could, but that means setting up my home LAN for remote access, which comes with all sorts of constantly changing security issues I don't want to spend time on.
Sightseeing is nice, but what gets me excited is learning new skills while traveling. Culinary classes, language lessons, local skilled crafts/activities. I never get bored learning new things.
This is something that has been bothering me somewhat. The following in particular bothers me a lot:
> "Why are you still working?"
The answer for me is simple - because I want to. I learned how to program at the tender age of 10 using a book that came with a C64 that my dad got for free from a garage sale.
Since those first years, the field at every turn has provided me with new intellectual challenges and as I've progressed I've accumulated different ideas and projects that I'd like to complete. That includes reasonably fleshed out ideas in bioinformatics, in distributed operating systems, in models for runtime type inference for dynamically typed programming languages, virtual machine construction techniques, and more.
I will never have enough time in my life to fully explore all of these - each of them will take years of dedicated effort to actually make something out of - so I have to pick and choose wisely to pursue the projects I care about given the opportunities presented to me.
My version of "cashing out" is basically sticking my money in a savings account and getting back to working on interesting things.. or if I have enough of it, using that money to pay some people to help me explore some of the more interesting things I have in my mental back pocket.
Some of us actually are passionate about our work. I suppose there are many that are in the field simply to make some big money and get out and live "the good life". I consider the life I would live doing that, and it just feels so soul-crushingly boring and insipid. What a waste of a life.
While I fully agree with your sentiments for the programming work -- I learned at 12 and never suffered a loss of enthusiasm, and I am 38 now -- I disagree on the money part.
You can love your job AND be rich. I've seen programmers achieve it. But to be brutally honest to all sides, it doesn't come to you by a mere technical talent. Knowing people, psychology, some sociology and basically having an eye for opportunity seem to be key.
I am not rich. I've made a ton of bad financial decisions in my life and for a year now I work really hard to prioritize things properly. I have success on that front and I am now a pretty wise spender (without being frugal, too) but I still live paycheck to paycheck.
To go outside that bubble we really have to stop believing in a "secure income". Many investors and financiers say: "diversify your portfolio". We must all be working on 4-5 places with 5-10h a week each I guess? Or just be consultants at several places where the workload for us is low? Have 10 small SaaS businesses each netting us $500 a month? Not sure yet.
But I definitely do agree that spending the rest of your life only managing your finances is boring and insipid and is a waste of life indeed.
I was responding particularly to the sentiment of why one would still be working as they get older, independent of financial situation.
I don't disagree at all that money and financial maturity matters - simply for assuring the security you need to feed, clothe and shelter yourself through the inevitable ups and downs of life.. as well as open up opportunities that you may not have otherwise had access to.
I once expressed the "I'm not in it for money, I just want to do a great product" thing to a CEO, and he immediately offered to cut my salary in half.
I got the message. (I had a few more happy years at that place, but never made much money there. I found that other companies could not only be better places to work, but that they paid better, too).
I wonder if part of the issue is a kind of unspoken fear that the “dream” outcome may not be as common as people want to believe.
If I am a young developer with more stock options than salary I want to believe that I will have the option of retiring early. Seeing older devs who were not able to “cash out” plays poorly with that narrative.
I had a chat with some recruiters recently and they told me there is no future in the industry for people who are 35+ years old. I'm 33 so I just smiled and walked away. I later learned the founder of this recruitment company was 26. Young kids seem to think there is no brains in older people.
On the other hand I always thought the natural progression for the programmer is to move to higher abstraction level, become lead/coach/consultant... or start something on their own.
It doesn’t matter how good you are, a team of 10 well-managed programmers will always out code you. You can hve higher output per hour, if you do the well-managed part.
Or you become a teacher. Make 10 programmers 11% better and you’ve contributed more to the company’s bottom line than you ever could on your own.
Or a consultant. In that one highly specialized area where you are king ... well a team of 10 can’t touch you because your pattern matching solves the problem right away.
Ultimately the older you are the more you understand that hey, maybe if your work is contributing millions to the bottom line, maybe you should be compensated proportionally and that $150k is a joke?
This understanding is a problem for new founders. First of all, they’d like to pay you less moneys and give you kool-aid instead. Team spirit and all that. Second of all, you are likely waaaay overqualified for what they actually need. Makes you hard to keep around and engineering churn is one of the toughest things to work around on a product team. Institutional knowledge is king.
So ageism comes about. Because experienced people are both expensive and unnecessary.
If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network. We have a dude pushing 70 he would be able to get a new job the day he would let people know he would consider switching a job.
I am 67, but this story occurred when I was young and just out of college: there was a very old computer programmer at work who had great skill but he miss-applied it. The worse thing he did was writing tortured FORTRAN code that self modified itself at runtime - hardware architecture and operating system dependent binary patches. I promised myself I would never be that guy, read the book ‘The Egoless Programmer’ and followed a different career path from my old friend.
You touched a different but very important issue: in this industry you need to recycle yourself, you need to stay up to date with new technologies that overcome the old ones. Being old doesn't necessarily means being obsolete, but you need to deliberately avoid obsolescence. Sometimes the new shiny things are actually good.
Some technologies fade and you should avoid fading with them. Assembly programming has become a niche for people that write compilers. FORTRAN is giving space to R and Python. Very few people still write COBOL.
In my 20s, I used to think like that because that's what I was told by everyone around me. Now I find this idea infuriating.
I'm almost 30 now and I've been working insanely hard since before I left school and during university; I've been working at least 70 hours per week for 12 years (40 hours on my startup or corporate contracting day job, 30 hours on a side project). I've had some minor successes but still no big break - I'm not far from where I left off financially.
One of the many companies I worked for is doing relatively well and I'm hopeful that my small stake will be worth enough to buy a modest house/apartment someday but it's still a big gamble at this stage; the shares could still become worthless... Even if everything goes perfectly well, it's still not enough for me to retire. I feel that I got very lucky with that one. I can clearly see how it's possible to get to 50 years old working nonstop like a freak and making all the right decisions and still not make it financially.
I've been quite strategic about my career so far. I worked for startups which had relatively low valuations, proven tech, value-creating areas, fast growth, good investors, smart founders, were just starting to onboard big clients and sign big contracts. I also worked for a few hyped SV startups too (I worked for a SV-based Y Combinator company for over a year).
Even among the 12 or so software companies that I worked at and left, none of them had successful exits yet or grew sufficiently that it would have allowed me to make enough money to retire (even if I could pick the best one and assume that I had been able to negotiate a good equity package). Only one startup I worked at is doing relatively well and that's also the one which I stayed at the longest and have the most equity in.
I feel that people who got a big break before they turned 30 missed out on learning about reality.
If you're optimizing for money, early startups would be the last place I'd look. I'm well aware that I'm making ~60% of a big 4 salary (tc) assuming my options are useless.
Additionally I doubt I'm learning as much technically than if I were to work at a big 4and be exposed to much smarter people.
The benefits of startups tend to incur huge tradeoffs.
I’m so grateful to have worked with older colleagues who did not care about using the framework du jour. Influenced by their experience, we made some unorthodox tech choices as a web startup, including the choice to use C++ and Lisp-like languages heavily, and it worked out beautifully. From them, I learned that it is more important to ship simple, fast code than to contort your system to use the latest tech fads when it doesn’t make sense.
It's always entertaining when you do the simplest thing that works, it works, and then you get to watch someone struggling for months to replace it because it was too simple and not buzzwordy enough.
I am not gonna be ashamed to admit that working like your parent commenter said is a good way to ensure you won't get fired out of the blue as well (since what you created is not easily upgradeable or replaceable).
But in any case that's a side effect of being competent and is not a specially crafted tactic -- at least during my career.
And finally, we have to fight hard against the philosophy that all programmers should be easily replaceable cogs in the big machine. That's an impossible dream of the businessmen but they still won't give up on it.
I took a bunch of time and focused on helping coders instead of coding myself. I came to coding naturally and never thought of it as much more than intellectual self-stimulation. It was a lot of fun, and there is some value to it -- but it tends to get a lot more attention than it should simply because it feels so good to do it well. Successful startup founders say that coding is no more than 2-3% of the total effort of providing value to people. I've found nothing to prove that false; and I've seen a lot of companies and startups.
Recently I'm back to focusing more on coding. I find two things most interesting:
1. As I get older, I struggle with attention span and short-term memory more, but I have greater ability to see deep and widespread cross-cutting patterns. It's probably an even trade.
2. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that good coding is managing cognitive complexity. You're always trying to make it work, then make it easy to understand and maintain. When I think back on all of the multi-billion-dollars I've seen in project/program disasters, none of it was because the problems were hard. They were all a combination of poor customer/user participation and smart folks taking a problem of n complexity and making it into a problem of n^n complexity. Usually the two were related: tech was constantly used as sort of a band-aid to fix people problems. It never worked, but it kept a lot of coders employed for a long time.
Hopefully this wasn't cynical. I love coding and I love making useful things for people. I have a deep passion for helping developers lead happier and more productive lives. But I also feel an obligation to be honest about what happens. It looks a lot different at 50 than it did at 25.
Think about it. Seriously, would you want somebody telling you that you wasted three years of dev time and could scrap what you have and roll something useful to production in a month? I've done that several times in my career, at various ages, and nobody ever liked hearing it. As I got older they liked hearing it even less. In this business, inexperience, raw intelligence, and enthusiasm are the things we reward. They come mostly with younger folks.
Tech development is amazing and incredible because we create our own realities. But part of that awesomeness is the fact that left alone, we create realities that look like ourselves. It is the nature of the work.
> 2. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding.
It depends on their attitude. The smarter the better, IMO, as long as they understand that the code they're writing isn't for them. They can go hack on some personal project if they want to flex their "I'm so clever" muscles, but if they're writing commercial code, that code is for the dumbest of the dumb who will ever have to maintain it. If someone can focus their intellect towards making their code clear and simple then great.
Of course, as you say, someone who's competent but has a slightly humbler intellect will just automatically write simpler code.
Someone correct me, but is the article generalizing some one young CEO to represent the entire Silicon Valley? If yes, is that accurate?
I’ve come across those types of people in my career. They were cancerous and didn’t last long. I’ve learned to tune out the noise and cut off people like that. Fortunately for me, I’ve never had run ins where these people had power over me. If they did, it’s a shitty company IMO to bring in people like that and I’m better off elsewhere.
Average age on my engineering team is about 55. Until recently, the eldest was still coding at 73.
When I look across the team, the more productive ones are those who keep their skills and tools up to date. Find a 30 year vet who can code the same routine in both Go and Python and you'll usually find a productive, dependable engineer who steers you around many gopher holes.
Young Michael Jordan could leap high and perform dazzling feats in mid-air. Old Michael Jordan had tired legs, but could destroy the competition with an insanely tight post-up game, and a virtually undefeatable fade-away jump shot.
I’ve personally always felt incredibly fortunate to get to work with people who’ve been in the industry a long time; you can learn a lot from them. And while you sometimes can get a “step” on them with your youth, they’ll often school you with the fundamentals.
This is part of the diversity conversation — having a team composed of people from all walks of life is a competitive advantage. But it takes an enlightened “coach” to see it.
Is it really common to retire at 35? I'd think it would be just a few could afford that. Around here property taxes plus health insurance for a family is $50k/yr. So from 35->65 that is $1.5m. Not including cost of living of course.
Maybe the stock market has been way too successful in the last few decades. Ask a European or Japanese person about retiring early and living off the market.
(of course many 35 year olds are struggling to save for a house deposit let alone thinking about retiring)
No, it is not common - even in the mythical valley. Very few people relative to the entire industry strike it rich with enough money to travel the world drinking champagne and eating caviar. The typical valley story goes:
When you're 20 - Live in SF and chase your startup dream of making it big. Most likely left with a bunch of worthless options and too little pay for the hours you worked, but great friends and memories (mostly of the after hours parties).
When you're 30 - Transition to FAANG like company. Live in SF and commute to the valley. Start making some real money but feel like you sold out. Still harbor dreams of quitting and launching your startup - right after that next big vesting period.
When you're 40 - Screw startups, you've got a family to feed, a mortgage to pay, and college tuition to think about. You've finally made the move from super-hipster, urban, walkable SF to a random suburb in the valley and may have even purchased gasp a minivan! Secretly, you find it a much more pleasurable living experience than SF but won't admit that to anyone.
When you're 50 - Hopefully, through hard work, smart financial decisions, and a little risk taking, you've gotten your finances under control. You've figured out how to use debt effectively, have a solid set of investments, and ideally are working toward multiple streams of income. You can now legitimately plan your next big career progression, whether that's retirement (still several years out), scaling back your full time work to focus on passion projects, or actually launching that startup (with a statistically much higher probability of success than any 20-something founder).
Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em.
Also, wealth is the world's shittiest metric for success. I know a ton of people with incredible skills who work rather low-paying jobs because they want to improve the world, follow a particular passion, or whatever.
>>Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em.
Well, there are other reasons. People you hire straight out of college tend to feel grateful, and also feel like they need to prove themselves (which is true). So they are usually willing to work extra hard. This can be a good quality, if nurtured properly with guidance and training.
I think the truth is that older, more experienced people do not provide visible value.
For example, do you think it's undergraduates who come up with the design and architecture for AWS? No, it's years of pain and lessons that go into it. Then the elders productize their pain and lessons so that undergrads never need to learn it.
This is why FAANG want undergrads: their processes keep noobs from making super stupid mistakes, through the law of large numbers, some survive, feel some pain, learn and make it to architect level enough to affect the next iteration of AWS/Google/Azure. At the same time, the company saves on salaries/benefits/work-life balance.
It won't change because it works. Act accordingly.
The "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.
When I started programming I was very productive, even more then today, but I was ignorant about performance, data races, xxs, sql injects, lower level programming, sysadmin, general CS, etc. So I think the problem is managers see new guys being more productive, but the old "slow" guys gets paid double.
Of course it is faster to build a solution with bad performance, is hard to maintain and a nightmare to test. The manager who doesn’t know the difference is just a bad manager.
I would argue if you were ignorant of those items, you were not very productive. Someone eventually had to come back and fix that.
It’s like tossing code at QA that you didn’t debug first. If your initial dev time was 8 hours but you have 6 more in fixing issues you didn’t really get done in 8 hours.
As a senior developer you have a dilemma, leave code dept and maybe later get accused of writing crappy code. Or fix all edge cases and and get accused for being too slow and expensive. By the time I have assessed the requirements to chose the optimal balance between hardness and dev-time, setup the right environment and automated the deployment, and made a plan for scaling out ... My former self would have already shipped the code, it would be billed, and the boss would be happy. But you are right about the total productivity, because a year or so later, the boss will wonder why something that took 3 minutes to do before, now takes 3 hours. But usually those hours are billable, so the boss is happy anyway. Then there's time to market vs software quality, how performance and security only becomes an issue after the fact, maybe I'll write a blog post.
Ageism is real in many verticals. It is healthy to acknowledge that. It’s equally important to face facts related to age: I am noticeably less focusable, and my memory is not as good. I slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows (or feels). Most importantly, I have many out of work responsibilities - parents (not getting younger) and kids (not getting older in sufficient pace). Consequently, odds of me doing after hours learning are diminishing. I don’t do open source any more, nor do I have time for cool side projects. And all that, not the invented stuff in OP, is what makes ageism a thing.
slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows
For me, it's the exact opposite. Containers? Oh yeah, they're just like zones on Solaris. Kubernetes? Works like a VAXcluster. Cloud? Been there, done that, let's not make the same mistakes. ML? Well we used to call it predictive statistics, the only real difference now is we run it on GPU not CPU. I pick up "new" techs easily because I can step back and see the same patterns repeating.
Experience is the killer app. Ageism is just another prejudice.
Many people (possibly most) don't see the similarities between ostensibly different things. They just don't make the connection.
I once had 2 different classes about stereo-vision (3D reconstruction with different view points). On the same year. One class was ostensibly about ecology. The other was ostensibly about computer vision. Only I noticed they taught the same thing, and everyone looked at me dumbstruck when I pointed this out. They didn't make the connection even when I made it for them.
Learning ability does slow down with age. If you compensate with making connections with past experience, it doesn't translate to less ability to learn new tech. On the contrary, as you pointed out you learn them faster, because you already most of it. If however you fail to make the connection, you will feel that slow down.
Same. At 40 years old, learning something 'new' is much easier now than when I was 20. First, there is not very much that comes out that is completely new and not built on existing foundational knowledge. Second, I can focus on the part that really is new, and not get tripped up on learning all of the foundational elements needed to understand said new thing.
The OP mentioned not having time, but I've noticed as I've aged I have more discipline and thus more time.
Same here. I've seen so many technologies at this point in my life, that picking up new ones is easy.
It's simply a case of quickly grokking which variation (on an existing technological approach) the new technology is taking.
There really aren't that many new groundbreaking ideas in tech; however, there's a lot of tribalism and silos (especially within individual programming language communities) which mean that old discoveries are often forgotten for a while until they are finally resurrected in a new guise.
I see the parallels in the way jobs are scheduled on the cluster rather than an individual node, storage is common across the cluster, nodes and leave and join hot, the manageability of it all... all seems very familiar!
As I've grown older, I've noticed a very strange phenomenon - my memory has certainly gotten worse but my reflexes have grown much quicker, seriously cat-like reflexes now. Perhaps it's time for a career change from tech to . . . circus performer?
I’m not arguing, just mentioning it as a fact. In places where my experience would not play critical role, it would make economical sense to hire someone 20 years younger.
Would you share how old are you? Sorry if you find that question out of place, but I'm 33 and have kids and I don't (yet?) make such observations as yours.
Not @avip, but I’m 47 and definitely feeling the time/family responsibilities crunch. Our parents have all just turned 70+/-2, we have two smart kids in elementary school who need to be fed almost every single day :), a house/yard instead of apartment, everyone’s healthy, but just managing school, activity, and holiday calendars is grueling. In my 20s and 30s, I could code like hell, have time to devote to learning new thing in depth, and play on 4-5 sports teams. Now, I’m still able to function almost the same mentally, but there are 20-40 fewer “free” hours in the week.
Something has to give and we’ve decided it’s not the kids... I wouldn’t go back and change anything, but it’s not the same.
Giving up Facebook was a huge win for me. People just don't appreciate how much of a time sink it is (by design). You might think "I'll just check it" then you look up and a quarter or a half an hour has passed!
For example I have 2x30min train journeys per workday. I used to spend them just idly scrolling the timeline, clicking like, maybe making some comments. Now I use them for reading on Kindle, or doing a module on EdX or Coursera. And that's even before all the other time I would spend on it. I literally got back 5-10 hrs/week, and it boggles my mind that I ever wasted that time to begin with!
Thanks for sharing! Now I understand what you had in your mind is yet to come for me, my children are still toddlers. I'm with you on huge time investment the family is, I am still in the phase where I'm hoping I can keep up by cutting sleep time but at some point during the day body finds its way to take back what was taken away from it...
It's pretty silly for commentators here to not recognize their current thinking rules their future selves out from any respectable employment and existence in the field because of the prejudice and massive assumptions about others their current selves hold. 1 or lets say even 10 out of 100 will strike it lucky, what are the 90 going to do. Retire at 35?
This is exactly like the 'temporarily embarrassed working class' supporting policies against their interests as they expect to be in exploiter roles 'soon'.
This kind of ideology tries to reframe software engineering not as a profession like others but some kind track and field with olympic stars dependent on youth working 100hr weeks to the exclusion of everything else. What happens to the majority for whom this does not pay off? This is self importance taken to delusion. This attitude will not only undermine your experience as you age but also directly reduce the quality of people entering the field as anyone studying now with options cannot logically choose a field where you are expected to work like a dog for long odds where experience does not count.
Well even outside of Silicon Valley the question changes to “why aren’t you a manager yet?”! Annnoying ageist question, despite that my experience is worth the money. You just need to avoid companies that doesn’t value it correctly.
My answer to that question is: "I've tried management and whilst I was told that I was good at it, I didn't enjoy it much - I discovered that I simply enjoy building and creating things, and that's what I do best".
Nevertheless, I appreciate that it's an irritating question, but I usually put it down to lack of empathy and/or life experience of the questioner. It would seem that some people just can't imagine that other people have lives, thoughts and aspirations that are different to their own.
My team has five middle-aged guys[1] on it, myself included, out of a total of 9. Three of the other four were hired by me. I can only live in hope that next time I need a job I'll be able to find somewhere that values experience as much as we do[2].
[1] It's changing slowly but female software engineers are very much in the minority in Cambridge. I suspect, although cannot prove, that the skew is even more pronounced amongst those of us in our 40s and beyond.
I have noticed the female SWE are in the minority in the Boston/Cambridge area, too.
At my first company in Boston, I was the first and only female programmer for a good year and it wasn't for lack of trying to hire more. I don't remember another female programmer on the web side (there were quite a few on the hardware side) but most of the team was over 30, with family, and was a good range of ages.
Now, I manage a team of five developers, only one of which is another woman. I'm 40 and she is 64. Then again, the youngest person on my team is 35 so we don't seem to have the problem of ageism in our company, thankfully. When we were looking for extra help, it was very difficult to even get people in to interview, let alone someone experienced enough. I'm hoping the job market for tech continues when I need a job again!
If accumulating money is important to you there’s basically two ways to match this manager’s expectation:
1) work at Facebook/google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc for X years, keep your spending low, and invest the rest wisely
2) work at startup X for 5-10 years and cash out in IPO
A manager can easily see on your resume if number 1 applies. In which case we look at number 2. The odds are good that no matter your badassery, you WON’T hit the jackpot, because a company’s IPO likelihood is dependent on far more things than your contribution.
What you see is some circuitous logic - “a talented person has made enough to retire”. But how do you define talented? By the fact they are of a certain age and have made enough to retire.
Maybe it's because I was just sitting here reading Ian Stewart's chapter on Sally Clark and pondering probability, but I rather suspect that the probability that you're over 50 and suck is much higher than the probability that you are over 50 and are a badass.
Mostly because the probability that you suck is incredibly high.
And I'm saying this as someone who is over 50, with a phd, a bunch of programming languages and blog posts, and crap on GitHub. And I know I suck. Hell, the primary advantage I have over most of the people I've worked with is that I know what a badass looks like in the wild.
I would agree with you that likely the majority of people over 50 do 'suck'.
But... so do the majority of people under 50. Somehow, things still get built and projects get finished. Fetishizing the rare genius doesn't help anyone, since by definition they are a rarity. How, exactly, does age make for worse employees? Since this discussion is about ageism specifically, and not that 90% of everything is crap.
There are a couple problems with your post coming
from a 50+ year old.
* Statistics and probability.
* PHD,blog posts, > 2 PL and github in the wild = respectable technical resume.
* Badass is as badass does.
I work with CS PHDs who are great with math->algo mappings, pattern recognition and data structures that couldn't build a scalable system in fifteen years. Instead you'd end up with some cloud struck monstrosity. I worked with ex auto mechanics who were so quick and deft with hardware, components and diagnostics that they could run/build a
DC by themselves. Which is the badass?
All I can say is thank god I don’t work in the valley.
Some people actually enjoy programming and don’t have equity. Not everybody who programs is a high school drop out entering the ground floor some trendy ad-based social start up. Some of us actually solve real problems.
Ageism is a real factor in tech companies but as the demand grows and tech companies have been around for decades this might go down a bit. May be not for startups but FAANGs definitely will have more aged developers. It’s also important to realize the other factors play in this. Where you are born, your race matters a lot more than many people think. Two people of same age and equal talent but different race aren’t treated the same way in almost any country in the world (Not trying to generalize but it is prevalent)
In my past two jobs, I've found that the software engineers who want to still be software engineers in a decade are in the minority - maybe a third of the workforce. If you spent your early career wanting to become a manager ASAP, then maybe it's easy to slip up and think of older software engineers as people who failed to make that transition, rather than dedicated individuals.
I think I must be one of the younger people on this site because while I agree ageism is a bad thing in the sense that age should simply not be a factor when it comes to hiring/pay, and that experience is good, I also have direct experience working with older developers who didn’t know the new tools we were trying to use (in my case, AI and big data) very well and so weren’t any more productive / were less productive than younger people who were more experienced within that subject area.
That being said, by far the best engineers I’ve met were the people who usually pioneered these systems 20 years ago and were now domain experts. But what I mean by this post is that I also have met a bunch of people who basically only know basic crud, and just because they had a lot of experience in that area didn’t mean that transferred very well to other areas.
There’s a limit to how much your knowledge of SQL and Windows server from a decade ago will help you with Kafka and Cassandra
But that has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with poor skills-fit. Because someone fresh out of a CS program won't be all that much better. You admitted that there are cases where experience helps, but some team members don't have that experience.
Isolate for variables, don't compare apples to oranges. You are comparing older engineers without relevant experience to "younger people who were more experienced within that subject area." What about younger engineers who aren't experienced? I suspect their performance will be equally poor, if not worse.
The value of older, more experienced workers is the wisdom they've accrued over the years. There's a reason they don't jump into every new fad that comes along and stick with tools that they know work.
There is a limit on where kafka and cassandra are best solutions for your domain. Anyone who only knows SQL and windows server shouldn't be working on new technology
stacks.
A few questions about this article.
1) is this hyperbole or is it a generalization that seems to follow the 80/20 rule?
2) I can’t imagine that there are enough jobs in SV that could consistently churn out millionaires- right? I would think that maybe some fraction of 1% of the people there hit the start up lotto.
3) I’m guessing this article mentioned here was scrubbed from the internet, but I would be curious to read it.
4) I enjoy working most of the time. Sure there are crappy days but I don’t think I would live a healthy lifestyle were I to be well enough off to not work at age 50.
5) if SV is really generally like this, why would someone want to be there? Is it just to get a shot at launching the next billion dollar company?
There are any number of talent pools that are overlooked because of widespread discrimination.
To win, you need to behave in a more rational way than the competition, which means discarding irrational biases and looking for help in places that others undervalue and disregard.
It’s a bit scary to hear these stories, especially as I squandered 20s getting a PhD, and most of my 30s living paycheck-to-paycheck at a non-FAANG R&D lab that pays peanuts. I’d love to move to a better-paying company, but it feels almost hopeless when I walk into a SV tech office and I’m the oldest-looking person there in my 30s.
That said, I’ve been interviewing developers over the last few months, and it’s hard to find good older developers on the SV job market (especially at a non-FAANG R&D lab that pays peanuts). We mostly get new college grads who are completely inept. I’d like to think the good older devs are gainfully employed somewhere.
I saw people quoting Charlie Munger. Munger has done extensive study on the topic of incentives. If you want to know why Silicon Valley is so discriminating towards experienced people you should ask what their incentives are.
Startups are incentivized to hire the cheapest, youngest, most naive engineers possible, work them as hard as possible then flip them. If you are old you are no longer cheap or naive. If you aren’t naive, you are unlikely to work 80 hours a week. You can no longer be flipped.
Silicon Valley startups want Ivy League type executives. Why? Because the investors trust them more. Humans give money to people who resemble themselves. Ivy League VC give money to Ivy League executives.
Joining a startup has a very low probability of making you rich. In fact, they are specifically designed not to make you rich as an engineer.
To make matters worse, you have to spend 3-5 years of life you will never get back trying to get the lottery payout.
You getting rich as a non founder at a startup means the executives and venture capitalists miscalculated something. Why would they pay you a cent more than they need to? There are plenty of people in the valley who will now work for just their base salary and nothing more. Why should they give you a single dime more than this?
If you are a typical high functioning aspergers engineer, you are better off using your skills to become a quant or a trader in the finance industry. Teach yourself.
The tools have advanced to a point where anyone can access huge amounts of leverage.
I was an engineer for a long time and I realized that all sides of this is a losing game. All I want is to be left alone and financially independent.
Big companies are just as bad, except they don’t pretend there is a chance you will get rich.
Pardon the esoteric language, but I feel almost as if this was written by my future self.
> I was an engineer for a long time and I realized that all sides of this is a losing game. All I want is to be left alone and financially independent.
^ This pierced my heart very painfully. Describes my current mindset perfectly.
I realized the full extent of how screwed we the engineers are in the job market just a year or so ago. We can bring millions in value but are paid much less than people who basically only bark orders (good managers do much more... but are so incredibly rare).
The whole economy of today's world seems to be in favor of certain traits and most of them are luck or incidental -- race, family, area of birth, and most of all: network/friends! I've known people dumb as bricks who couldn't solve a problem if the solution was biting them on the nose yet they knew a few influential people and right now are making ~$90k a month for wearing suits and showing up to meaningless meetings 4 times a month.
---
It's not easy starting to come to grips with the extremely rigged nature of the world's economy and NOT be bitter or self-loathing. Not hating myself for being stupid before and not looking objectively at the world is taking 99% of my free energy but I'll keep fighting that battle until I forgive myself and start looking forward to the future. Meditation and exercise do help.
Sorry for the personal aside. Your message resonated with me. I am currently 38 years old and just finished an extremely tough and terrible period during which I couldn't get a job even though I aced most interviews up until the last phase when the mythical "poor cultural fit" door got slammed in my face. This happened about 20 times over 6 months.
Now, even though I found the perfect company and team whom I very much like, I am left with a ton of existential questions which I don't have the answer to.
What advice could you give me?
(I'll look into the quantative analyst in more depth for sure.)
After a certain amount of time (my guess is around 5 years experience) software engineers tend to experience diminishing levels of returns when it comes to productivity over years of experience. The difference between an SWE with 5 years experience and one with 1 year experience is massive, but the difference between somebody with 5 years experience and 10 years experience is much less so.
I'm talking about standard software engineering roles - CRUD based applications and so on. The story is different for more specialised roles that involve expert knowledge i.e. machine learning, data science, computer graphics, info security etc.
If I see the CV of somebody who has been doing the same kind of software engineering jobs for 20 years my thought is that this is somebody with no real interest in it and just does it as a 9-5 job. Now personally I don't see anything wrong with that. However, the problem is the difference between an "enthusiast" and a "9-5er" is much less apparent when they are young, their CVs will likely be very similar if they both have 3-5 years experience, however after 20 years it will become clear who is "passionate" about their craft and who just wants to go home to their family at the end of the day. Again I have nothing against people like that and I'm sorry for using the word passionate like that but I think that this is one of the root causes of this issue..
If I go to a doctor who misdiagnoses an issue I have, I don't generalize that all doctors are incompetent. That doctor, in my particular case, misdiagnosed my issue.
Below a certain age, tooling and practices knowledge is likely to be up-to-date. First thing they learned was today’s ways.
Above a certain age, it takes additional expertise to assess whether the individual kept learning every year or just kept relying on the first thing they learned.
Recruiters and contentless managers often fail to tell the difference, so mis-bias on age which doesn’t cause but can correlate to out-of-date skills.
At both ages, young and old, assess for self-learning, not age.
> Below a certain age, tooling and practices knowledge is likely to be up-to-date.
There are exceptions. C++ game devs for instance often shun the STL for good reasons (compilation times, performance of debug build…), and then the junior fresh from college must unlearn most of what they believed about "modern" C++. They're up to date on the standard all right, they're just not up to date on the best practices of the field they're getting into.
Slightly OT, but hasn't this changed in recent years? I'm not in the industry, but I'd heard that things like EA_STL had gone out of fashion in favor of just using STL. If this is the case, are there any resources for what to be wary of in the STL?
1/ Keeping up involves unlearning too. For me, that's the hardest part. Trying to approach everything with a "new mind". Meaning my expectations for how stuff is supposed to work gets in the way of seeing whatever is in front of me for what it truly is.
2/ A fair amount of new stuff isn't better. Or it's a mixed bag. Discerning the Brownian motion from the legit improvements is a lot of work.
I've long found that there's a fine line between legitimately noting that the last 8 incarnations of $CONCEPT didn't work for A, B, and C reasons so #9 isn't likely to fare any better and being endlessly negative about every new idea that comes down the road because almost every new idea is an echo of a prior pattern at some level.
I celebrate every new cohort reinventing the wheel. Learn by doing.
The first 95% is generally easy. It's that last 5% that kicks your butt. Addressing all those pesky edge cases. And after snuffing all the bugs, realizing that perhaps one's predecessors weren't morons after all. (Insert Mark Twain quote here.)
And every blue moon, someone comes along with a novel way of framing a problem, elevating the state of the art to the next plateau.
The only bit that truly bothers me are the fads, groupthink. As though us graybeards were never obnoxious know-it-alls ourselves, back in the day.
On the general theme, as I type I have a gap in my team that on paper is for a more junior, inexperienced developer; I have deliberately not starting looking for someone to fill that post, and told HR to consider it simply frozen for the moment, because right now I simply don't have the spare capacity within the team to take on an inexperienced developer. Another vacancy, for a more experienced developer, I am hiring for.
If you're doing the same thing for 30+ years you probably are doing something wrong anyway unless it happens to be the thing that you enjoy doing most.
Brain craves diversity. That's a fact. I love programming a lot even at 38 but lately I really feel the need to immerse myself into something else for a while -- and I am pretty sure I'll come back to programming even stronger and smarter. I just need to get programming out of my head for a few months.
...But living paycheck to paycheck robs us of the opportunity to give in to this very human need (diversification of our experiences). This has become one of the reasons I started to feel old and tired (while still being only 38) and lately I'm putting a lot of conscious effort to be financially wise so I can buy myself a few years of break eventually. That, or I'll improve my self-confidence and work as a consultant and a founder. Time will tell.
Did you have such a period in your life? If so, how did you handle it?
Yes, quite a few in fact. It has led me to the point where I purposefully shake things up every couple of years to avoid getting stuck in a rut. It took me a decade or two to realize this was causing me problems, but once it became deliberate it actually helped to provide structure. Easily bored is a complete understatement.
> If so, how did you handle it?
I try to do something radically different every couple of years now. The last company I started has upset my careful plans though, it took more than a decade to take off.
If you have a young CEO with very little prior work experience, why would you expect them to understand how to recruit, hire and manage people who are different from them? We tend to prefer people we can understand and relate to and if you are a 20-something who hasn't had a professional career yet, people older than you may be a bit of a mystery. As will being a CEO or a manager.
I keep getting recruiter spam every week, and I've made it a point to be polite--I may take some time, but I do reply to every message that isn't an automated shotgun mail, because even though I am sometimes exceedingly annoyed at the airheadedness and calousness of some recruiters, there are often valuable insights to be had as to one's value in the marketplace, and one out of ten interchanges usually leads to meeting interesting people.
Now, I'm in Europe, and around half the recruiters who figure out my age break off contact or ghost me immediately (at least until the next opportunity comes around--I had one major tech company ping me repeatedly in 2017 and break off every time...).
> If you want a healthy team, you're going to need a mix of people. Cutting off entire segments of the population from your company's ranks just because you don't understand their value only hurts yourself.
The article referenced on this one, regarding company culture, is spot on for my current role and company.
But the author's observation of 'make hay while the sun is out ' is spot on.
Shame on company middle managers perpetuating this mindset, but i cant help think such discriminatiom is a cost optimization habit. How are recruitors punished for categorically dismissing a demographic?
I understand how the company is hurt, but how is the recruitor, the gatekeeper, incentivized to NOT be dismissive?
I think people prefer this mentality when the economy isn't doing so hot. Same goes for people who think they're being treated unfairly by age. The health of the economy is the deciding factor and depending on the health of the particular industry as well. Older developers I've encountered have always been super. Unless they have some ego that tries to claim superiority by "age" equating to more experience; which is never the case.
I am yet another, visibly old (57), former paper (one) millionaire. I like sailing, climbing, biking, skiing, snowboarding, etc., but I have zero interest in retiring and pursuing any of these activities full time. It would become too boring. I'm self employed and work on cutting edge R&D projects I'm passionate about. I really don't care what someone's definition of success and its timetable is, neither should you.
Good blog post, nice write up of the conversation, but she left out the part at the end where the CEO bemoans the shortage of qualified software engineers.
I think this line of thinking is fallacious on the premise that the industry is growing at such a fast rate the next generation of engineers and developers is exponentially larger than the previous creating this illusion that most of the older folks must have retired by their 30s or 40s.
As a programmer in my 50s, I offer younger HN participants this idea: You will get old (if you are lucky). This will be of concern to us all at some point. I know of nobody who quit early and lived happily ever after.
Soon I’ll be on the wrong side of 30 and part of the reason I strive to master important skills is because I know I’ll be put out to pasture some day if I can’t demonstrate my value. I don’t want to depend on a post-ageist society to save me.
... which should be mentioned with numbers. Otherwise go by what's in the article - 2 anecdotes. My anecdote is that I'm > 40 but highly saught after engineer,by several CEOs far younger than me. But I know it does not mean that's the general pattern.
Edit: everything in the article was a good read, except the generalization in its title
Works pretty well for Google tho. Too bad most companies dont understand that they are not Google! and never will be - most often - dont even have to be.
Unfortunately most managers are sheeps, only able to copy ideas of other ppl without thought if its even needed/required.
Im in this industry for a few years and already see that all middle level managers should be fired. Software Craftsmen would be a lot better to lead projects.
How does it work for Google? Except for the "search+ads" division, which seems too important to ruin, Google gives the impression of a highly unfocused company with internal feuds and fiefdoms that releases one half-baked product after the next.
It seems to me that Google only hires to keep people from working for the competition.
I think you might be greatly underestimating the fraction of the company that works on search or ads if you think you can make a meaningful comment about the company that starts with "Except for the 'search+ads' division."
