If a small bank got into the insurance business prior to financial services dereg of 1999, it would have been crucified by the feds. Citibank and Travelers did exactly that, but since our justice and regulatory structures are pay-for-play, and their market capitalizations were high enough, they were able to proceed without controversy.
On an individual level, our prison population is disproportionately black, and disproportionately locked up on minor charges with an inadequate defense. A prison stay has far-reaching consequences on wealth, employment, and social status.
As a small business person, if I were to copy an idea from Apple (like, say rounded corners), they would sue me into the ground (I think their suit with Samsung is already over $1B). If they were to steal my idea, I would go broke on attorneys fees long before I ever got to a courtroom.
Equal opportunity isn't worth much without equal justice under the law. You'd have a good run, only to have the house take back all the winnings in the end.
I doubt that a lawyer, doctor, or (especially) investor could survive more than a year without constantly investing time in learning about their field.
Yeah, but what you've learned doesn't effectively rot away at the same rate. Old diseases don't go away, people don't develop new organs as they discard old ones.
I realized this way back in the mid 1990s when suddenly everyone wanted a "webmaster" with 10 years of experience, when suddenly HTML - a document markup language - became the most important "programming language" one could know.
Since then I have studiously avoided specializing in any technology. As soon as I feel like I've spent enough time in a particular stack to start to "know" it, I move on. I have refused to be pigeonholed into any particular tech.
The coding / language skills are the very least important skills I have, I intend to keep it that way. However I can present an extremely long laundry list of technologies that I have built solutions with - the length of the list, not the presence of any particular TLA on it, is the key to demonstrating my learning ability.
Not sure why you think I haven't learned new technologies.
I have learned them whenever I needed to. Most of the new technologies are not that special. That makes them easy to learn, but, also, kind of annoying because I can see that they're just repeating a mistake I've seen 20 years ago already.
I obviously don't think you haven't learned new technologies in 25+ years. It seemed like the claim to ageism was that the kiddies expect you to know the hot, new technology. Requiring knowledge of new technologies for candidates isn't exclusive to veterans. And it's definitely not a requirement of the other 90% of companies that are using older technologies.
I thought you thought that, because you said it. Perhaps I missed a nuance, English is not my strongest language.
My point, going up this discussion thread a few clicks, was that new technology is not always better than the old. Ageism comes into play when one's opinion about the new tech is dismissed just because one has some gray hair.
Almost every ageism post I've read on HN ignores the hundreds of thousands of others jobs that exist outside of [hot SV tech companies] (avg age at FB is 28? no way!), and also don't mention those people who are right of the bell curve and working at companies like that (because their experience actually is valuable).
Some of these posts are real ageism claims, but most are "I'm old, I'm scared, how am I going to survive with a highly valuable skillset?" It's fear mongering. If you're concerned with job security, go find a job with security in government or in some monolithic non-tech company based in Go-Fuck-Yourself, GA. The "Hi, Fellow Kids" hipster-posing BS isn't going to land you a job at Facebook no matter how old you are.
Not so much "get out of tech" as it is "stay in tech, but not at a company that specializes in tech".
Non-tech companies need specialized software, too. When I was in college, I knew multiple people who had internships working on internal tools for a major bank. I imagine those banks also employ senior people to work on their internal tools, customer-facing web portals, etc.
And it's not just banks. I once interviewed for a job working on e-commerce stuff for Neiman Marcus. I'd imagine that other retailers like Walmart, Target, etc. need people working on their portals.
And if you want to work with technology but get out of programming, everyone needs IT.
They tend to be more mature environments, free of the "brogrammer" culture that's hostile to older people, women, LGBT people, etc. There's not attitude of "let's have a cool, hip office full of cool, hip young people". It's an environment where "culture fit" isn't used as an excuse to discriminate against older people.
It actually turns out that more corporate environments are actually friendlier to marginalized groups than a quirky freewheeling startup.
Job security is great. Big, established juggernauts don't have the kind of churn startups have... there's no worry about "what if the VCs don't go for another round of funding?", and the markets are well-established and slow to change. And if you go into defense contracting or public sector, you might even have lifetime employment.
The work environment is probably going to be nicer. Traditional corporations don't do open offices and don't require engineers to work 60+ hour weeks. Some of us would prefer do to 9-5 in our own cubicle. Banks are also especially generous with PTO (and remember that the "unlimited" PTO you get at startups is a scam)... I'm just going to quote a friend of mine on Facebook when I decided to post a general question of "how much PTO do you get?":
> I used to work for a bank, and they're notorious for giving tons of time, but when in my first position, I had 2 weeks paid vacation, 10 holidays, 10 sick days, and 2 WTFever days. When I was rehired further up the food chain, I got 4 weeks paid vacation, 10 holidays, 10 sick days, and 2 WTFever days, and I could buy an extra week off by lopping a week of pay off my annual salary. If I'd stayed longer, climbed more, I could max out at 8 weeks paid vacation with all the rest of it.
Not all of us care about doing interesting or ground-breaking work. We just want to stay employed so we can fund our lives, and we want a work environment that doesn't make us hate ourselves and want to die.
Honestly, I'm pretty happy at my employer -- we're a tech company, but the environment is very corporate (we're a telecom), and it doesn't feel like a startup at all. The work environment is highly praised, we're ranked as one of the top work environments on Glassdoor, and half of my team are graybeards. I don't want to leave here, but if it ends up happening anyway, I'm giving serious thoughts to pursuing public sector work after this.
I think he's trying to say that ageism isn't as much of a big deal as people make it to be (outside of SV's alternate reality) - everyone in the industry deals with the constantly shifting landscape that engenders feelings of job insecurity for programmers young or old. It's just tougher on older techies that haven't carved out their niche. If you're trying to fit in and compete with fresh bootcamp grads working new frameworks at age 60, you're probably due for retirement - there's a reason why the traditional career path was to engineering management positions for senior engineers. Either management, or something you're really good at that isn't the most hip new tech but still in high demand.
I really dislike this constant caveat that people keep placing against SV. "Well it isn't a problem outside of SV!" I keep seeing this appear in comment after comment on this article
That too, but also, a lot of us outside the valley have to deal with the unfortunate consequence of everyone looking towards SV as the "trendsetters" or sort of the ones who set the "meta" for "modern" software development, if you will, especially since most major confereneces are out in SF/SV area. At my own company, directors and above take frequent trips out west.
What this all boils down to, is if SF/SV is going to be seen as the beacon of software development, it is almost worse to me if it is ageism is being exemplified there. To give a rather rough corollary, consider if Washington D.C. never hired another underrepresented group, such as females, or minorities. It's sort of like, "well maybe I halfway, sadly expect that to happen in some small town somewhere", but C'mon! D.C.! Everyone's looking to you!" -- Same kind of thing.
Maybe, but maybe it's less pronounced? It's hard for me to say, as I've only ever not lived/worked in SV (hello from North Carolina). But FWIW, I am 43, and I don't feel like ageism has been a problem for me. I just went through a job search and had no problem landing a new gig in short order.
OTOH, to be fair, I am obsessive about learning new stuff, and I've been working with some "trendy" stuff the past few years (all big-data, hadoop, storm, kafka, etc. stuff) and I've been doing a lot of machine learning / data science MOOCs over the past year or so. So my skills are a good match for what there's demand for. But that would be valuable if I was 20, 30, or 80.
Agreed. The deliberate ignoring the whole world outside FB/Google is a alarming sign that the idea is just to get blog reads by piggybacking the last bombastic statement by someone famous in the sw industry.
The whole world outside of GAFA looks to those companies for "how to do software development right" - no matter if they are right or not.
I've watched more than a few well established companies start to ape Google's hiring practices, or Amazon's churn, or Facebook's development practices just to try and attract new young developers.
I've been playing around with this concept for a couple of years (never having executed) and was expecting to be disappointed but this is very thoughtfully executed. I only wish this was open source :)
I can imagine, my need for it as a personal tool was strong enough that I just couldn't resists building it haha, it evolved quite a bit further than I expected though.
Could I ask why you'd have hoped for open source? If it's any consolation, I'm making the API completely open, and I'd have no problem with custom clients. In fact, I may even consider open-sourcing the default web-app client. But as for running it as a SaaS rather than distributing the whole thing as open source, I feel like the whole project will have a brighter future if it's set up in a sustainable way like this, and subscription fees can be invested back into the product, towards marketing, development, scaling etc.
Single founders have a very high bus factor, and for any other reason that you decide not to continue supporting the product, there's some insurance for people who invest a lot of time and data in the product as early adopters if the source lives somewhere. I think you should make money for your work. I don't have time to research now, but I'd bet there's a boilerplate license that would protect your work while allowing other developers to contribute and install for personal use only.
In lieu of all of that, I'd like to be able to export my data at a minimum. It sounds like the API would let me do that though.
One small, unrelated suggestion: set up something like UserVoice to take bug reports and other feedback from users. I may have missed an existing feedback channel if it exists.
Thanks for all your hard work on this. It's one of the best products I've used in a while.
Ah right, yup fair enough. Data export is definitely on my radar, but it's a bit early at this stage. As you say, worst case, you'd be able to extract your data via the API.
Yes, good point - it's just a single contact form at the moment, probably time for an upgrade.
Re caring about making a great product, that's alright haha. I used to be a money chasing developer, but I had a bit of an epiphany, and realised that trying to help others improve their lives means a lot more to me than spending my life acquiring and hoarding possessions and wealth!
1. Sometimes it's worth it to do something that's not your favorite for a bit of income. If you have the tenacity to become good at coding despite not finding it thrilling, it is one of the more interesting, safer, and lucrative careers out there.
1.a. You don't have to be lucky to get a job coding. There is almost unlimited demand for solid people. Not brilliant people. Just being good and even reasonably likable is enough to get almost certain continuous employment.
2. "You have to find something else to do at 35." Give. Me. A. Break. Ageism is real, but it's not going to start hindering you this early.
3. Learn to run a server. What? This is why sysadmins are at the top of the software corporate food chain, right? And, don't get me wrong, I mean no offense to my talented sysadmin colleagues, but you'd have to be blind and deaf and insensate to belief they are "ruling the world" compared to software engineers in any meaningful sense of the phrase. Maybe they should be, but if we observe reality, software engineers are better compensated, work easier hours, and have a much easier time making their way into management.
Ageism is real, but it's not going to start hindering you this early.
Agreed; at least, where I am, if I were simply 10 years older (putting me over 35), I'd be making twice what I am now. Certainly not looking for a job.
Excellent question, smokestack! My goal is to test the viability of such a product with real customers. I am applying my experience to help out fellow developers with most of the possible combinations of interview requests, and I offer a money back guarantee if somebody is not 100% satisfied.
I think you'd be better off getting folks who are actual interviewers (or ex-interviewers) from Google, etc, to conduct interviews; your site focuses on that as one of its selling points but your resume doesn't match up (in fact your LinkedIn gives no indication of how experienced an interviewer you are).
I think this is one of those products that's best served by finding people one-on-one who need help, and providing it for free so you get a bunch of testimonials, pictures, videos, etc -- rather than throwing up a landing page and survey. It's definitely a useful service; I mentor folks in interview practice occasionally these days, and there's certainly an appetite for it, though a lot of people I talk to tend to go about it by applying for jobs they don't really want and using those interviews as practice.
Edit: who wouldn't reject these things if they weren't benefiting from them (vast majority of people)?