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Comment by joewee | Hacker News Reader

Care to list a few for those who might be looking for something like that?

I work at SAP. I'd say we're pretty neutral on age - I work with people 20 years younger to 2 years older than me.

I think I've put in maybe two 40+ hour weeks in the past 5 years. I manage several devs and I hate dashing the younger (or ambitious) ones' dreams of resume driven development. My team handles a legacy system that neither crashes frequently nor needs extensive refactoring. "Sorry, cutting up and containerizing the system and using Kubernetes to deploy isn't worth the headache."

I know I'll keep getting promoted (and so will my reports) if I make sure my manager doesn't get calls from his manager asking why there are service outages.

Things move very slowly on purpose. It's better to miss delivery dates than to get bad press or run afoul of laws (which begets bad press).

What do you recommend to the younger or ambitious devs who want to grow in their career -- do you send them to training or let them have a side project of some kind so that they still have a somewhat valuable resume, or is it more a question of trying not to get junior devs (who need the resume building badly) in the first place?

I'm curious because I work at a big company but not in a maintenance or operational role so I'm not sure what an "ideal" resume or career track looks like for such people.

This is great. I just quoted from this during a meeting. Thanks!

Just anecdata, but in my experience any company whose product is not software tends this way. Standard Insurance, Kroger, that sort of place - they have large software groups, but those groups report in to traditional executives from non-software backgrounds.

Insurance companies, logistics companies, civil engineering companies, civil service and government institutions, basically any company that uses a lot of specialized in house software, but don't ship software as part of their core business.

I work for Grove; company-wide we have a pretty wide age spread (between 20's and 40's/50's from what I can tell without walking around asking people how old they are). Per-department is a bit of a different story, but Engineering seems to be reasonably age-diverse.

We're also hiring pretty aggressively right now (grove.co/careers), for what it's worth.

Danaher / Danaher Labs - assuming you can avoid having a bad manager.

Our home room would regularly scold us gently for working late / weekends. The problem was, the home room wasn't really in charge.

What's a "home room" in this context?

I directly reported to a manager, who in theory, was responsible for my performance/etc. It was his job to play the "good cop" unless I was really fucking up.

However, on a day-to-day basis I was reporting to a project lead (IT Director for an OpCo) for all practical purposes for the duration of the project I was on. "Bad cop".

In theory, this structure is good for the employee if your homeroom is willing to call BS on the guy running the project. You end up with 2-3 managers evaluating you (depending on scale/# of projects) rather than 1 which can help even things out to "fair".

However, if you are in my situation (direct report to CTO) vs. (home room, who is far down on the ladder relatively speaking)...the home room manager ends up protecting himself/career and doesn't push back. So you end up (for all practical purposes) being a direct report to the project lead until the project is done.

On the whole, its a better management structure than most places and as long as you don't end up on a bad project it greatly reduces problems.

If you end up on a bad project with a bad manager well...it really depends if your home room will defend you or not. 50/50 shot at protection is better than the 0% you get at most places.

I like working at VMware. It has a good work/life balance, age distribution seems well distributed, and only a couple hackathons a year -- totally optional.

> only a couple hackathons a year

Over one hackathon a year sounds like overkill to me, and I've never heard of a company with over two of them (not saying they don't exist of course)

Actually, it is once a year... I was mistaken.

I’m at a company that does them quarterly, but they happen (mostly) during work hours.

The team I work for at Red Hat has many older developers with children.

15 years ago I talked to few guys at Oracle and they said the devs of the core database are pretty old since experience in this area really counts.

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