How the Valley treats experienced people
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
"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]
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-sma...
[2] https://theconversation.com/anand-vs-carlsen-the-age-effect-...
[3] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
EDIT: Fixed year of quote reference.
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.
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.
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).
So, yeah, some of us are still working because we had the naivete to want to make the world a better place.
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.
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
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.
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.
Sad that cashing out may have ejected "staying and contributing" as a measure of success and indicator of worth.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
We think about market risk and forget about the downside risk imposed by neglect, fraud and incompetence.
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.
> 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.
In other words, "same [lower than they expected] bar, same [lower than they expected] salary" as someone 2-3 years in industry.
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.
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.
By the way I'm a big fan of your work, and seriously envy the quality of projects you've worked. Especially your work at NASA using Common Lisp.
You sound so humble. But I'm sure a lot of people(including me) here on HN aspire to be somebody like you.
I quite liked my Triplebyte interview too (all the better that I could do it with my own Emacs config and in Racket).
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.
Were you applying to a place that writes a ton of Ruby?
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.)
This looks just like an Ad I see on reddit all over the place.
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?
(Disclosure: I have a friend at Triplebyte)
Get off my lawn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
If they can, take off the date of birth, remove the year on your degrees and don't list experiences beyond 20 years.
I actually spoke to him at a tech event, he was super nice and I totally don't doubt the 'culture fit'
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love working where there is a mix of young and old, where they get along.
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.
I think we are talking about 45 yr old with 2 kids and a mortgage.
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.
In other words, I've never observed what you describe, never even heard of it
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.
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")
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.
“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.
I didn't say there was. I was talking about people who wanted more than that.
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.
"Working smart"?
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.
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.
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.
Yes there is, actually. It is called "working for one of the big 5 tech companies/or one of the unicorns".
200k+ total comp is the norm for someone with a couple years experience working at one of these places.
And god knows how much the people with 10+ years make. A Google L6 (staff engineer) makes something like 450k?
For good or ill, people tend to fall out of the funnel as they hop from job to job.
And there are things to spend it on here. Heck many in their thirties do this.
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.
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.
In my experience there are two kinds of pre-kid people: those who aren't ready for it and those who lie about being ready for it.
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.
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.
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.
The younger ones can overwork themselves, job hop, write bad code. And then an experienced coder can sigh and fix it.
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.
Did you mean "wrench", as in "throw a wrench in the works"?
'work to death when you are young or raise family when you are old' is not a good 'value', imo.
Your employer shouldn't have some 'values' about what you do outside work.
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.
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 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.
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.
Whatever floats your boat, though :-)
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.
We all have a causal wake behind us.
He wasn't talking about a sailboat, but anyway any sailboat built for ocean passages will have a diesel auxillary.
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.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/cruises/news/french-freig...
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.
You don't have to be idle while you're traveling. I always spend a few hours "working" when I travel. I find it too tiring to be out all day anyway.
> "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.
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 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 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).
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.
Every job I've had in computer-related tech since the first one out of school came from people I knew and had worked with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
I used to think that way, but after the two big downturns in 2001 and 2008 I am sadly a lot more realistic now..
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.
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.
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.
Of course, early retirement happens for vanishingly few workers. Some companies go Google or Uber and let the founders retire, but most do not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The OP mentioned not having time, but I've noticed as I've aged I have more discipline and thus more time.
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.
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!
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.
You reap what you sow.
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.
[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.
[2] Also, we're still hiring.
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!
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 think I'm going to get some more coffee now.
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.
* 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?
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.
EDIT:
If I had to guess at the quote the article author was looking for I would guess it is this: https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-sma...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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..
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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...).
That could be a direct quote from Peopleware.
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?
Rather like going from ‘my friend’s house got robbed’ to ‘all houses get robbed’.
Edit: everything in the article was a good read, except the generalization in its title
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.
It seems to me that Google only hires to keep people from working for the competition.