Older job seekers get fewer offers on LinkedIn but a younger profile photo helps

How old is "old"? I'm 32, is my Lifeclock already red/black?

This is just another one of your comments saying the same thing. And the top reply is a current employee saying it's not true.

Do you actually have any proof about what you're asserting?

Could you do something like:

I have 1 year experience. I also happen to have 2, 3, 4... etc. In total I have 15 but that includes any lesser number of years too.

It's really an issue with ego in organizational structures and power. I've managed people far more experienced or skilled in areas than me. It simply requires you to realize you're not inherently 'superior' to the people you manage, just that you're managing (i.e. manager) highly skilled people to solve problems.

Recognize when to trust people and do just that--you know they're awesome, they know they're awesome, why not take advantage of that and build on it to create something more awesome? Learn to be wrong or make bad management decisions out of ignorance and accept when experienced people suggest or tell you otherwise--they may even give you a way out of a mess you created. Skilled people with that sort of experience often aren't trying to correct you to insult you, they're trying to help you, the team, and themselves by offering their wealth of experience and knowledge.

It's when experienced people like this are quiet is when you should really be worried. If they aren't making suggestions, unless you're sure of yourself, you've likely created or been subjected to an environment experienced individuals have given up on improving and are now in death marches on your project efforts, quietly updating their resumes and awakening their contacts, looking for new positions.

The only algorithm for hiring someone should be as follows:

if (candidate.canCode && !candidate.isAsshole) return true; return false;

Yes, "cultural fit" is just a way to evade the charge of discrimination in hiring.

I think the sane are locked up in the asylum these days, and the loonies are in the spotlight.

I have the exact same experience. Many would-be peers simply don't get it when I have very little interest in the type of framework or language they use. They take it as a sign that I cannot contribute to the team readily even though they acknowledge I have more experience.

My company has a kind of cultural disease where everyone aspires to be an architecture astronaut, people with an ounce of talent or ambition learn to treat code as beneath them, consequently we get beautiful design docs and a garbage codebase. For that reason I would fail any candidate who displayed this attitude. I expect senior candidates to raise the bar on quality and craftsmanship in implementation, and I’ve met plenty who do. YMMV.

I don’t think being a framework partisan is a particularly good sign, but at least it shows you have some experience and reflection and taste with regard to the tensions involved in making things that run.

"the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. "

No offense, that kind of seems to be your issue, not theirs.

In large orgs if there are 10 'technical but not really dev roles' for ever 2 devs ... that's the reality of the world we live in.

It's maybe 'sad' that we call can't write code, but that's maybe not quite an 'industry' problem.

On the other hand, using giant fragile stacks with a million dependencies and systems that are an 'inherent mess' ... well that's maybe a little bit different and motivation is different because you might be actually wasting your time.

But in reality there is a ton of work to be done and most of it is not glamorous.

It's number 39. in Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design.

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

I have this on my list of questions I ask interviewers. I should follow-up with "how much of your budget is dedicated to this?" Major red flag if they don't even know how much catering to their NIH syndrome currently costs them.

That reminds me of people comparing writing in JavaScript (without their pet abstraction library) to writing in assembly. What a bunch of horse shit. It’s a red flag to self-identify configuration monkeys (people limited to following instructions) apart from those that can actually write and test applications.

This rule about absolute failure in rolling your own realistically only applies to cryptography, because the bar there is set extremely high and there is a rigorous vetting process.

I often come to this conclusion.

One of my frameworks has hundreds of open source contributors now, and tens of millions of downstream users use things built on top of it.

I'm now working on another one, and we just had our first few PRs from people who aren't me.

And I ain't too young anymore.

(And yes, this comment, while true, is tongue-in-cheek; there were darned good reasons for making new frameworks in both cases)

Backend framework? Fair enough. Frontend framework? I'm really not so sure anymore.

    user does something -> change state -> modify DOM

This isn't exactly rocket science.

If the existing framework is so great, why does it keep getting replaced with a new framework? Why aren’t we all still on Angular?

And if we all keep hiring only the best candidates, why would we think that they can’t write a better framework? somebody is writing a better framework.

> As an engineer with more than 15 years professional experience, my definition of "junior shit" would be thinking you can hand-roll a foundation or framework better than something that already exists.

You're not wrong, although to be fair, it isn't always about hand-rolling a framework. Sometimes it's just about experience and knowledge about which existing framework might best fit a given use case (without unnecessary bloat) as opposed to just choosing the latest "ooh shiny!" bloated buzzword framework to build upon purely because it's new and trendy this week.

Although some use cases do call for the "bloated" framework, because feature requirements demand using a framework that provides those features. Again, experience and knowledge can inform whether this is necessarily the case, and one should obviously avoid hiring any applicant who does not see a valid need for the choice of framework/toolchain when it was chosen for good reason.

When you now have things like TypeScript that allow you to define interfaces completely external from your logic you have already addressed half of what frameworks solve for without writing a single line of code. After that the only things left that frameworks provide are APIs and composition. If you know what you are doing you define your APIs first in consideration for the business logic and save composition for the final step after all other logic is written. Then you can make any adjustments to your internal APIs as necessary to glue things together. No framework is needed, minimal refactoring, and a smaller code base with less complexity because a generic framework doesn’t know your business requirements in advance.

But how much typing, how much staring at screens, how many meetings are needed to reach your actual goals? I care about the choices bc the wrong ones create problems which require more typing, or typing at night. "The job doesn't change" except the amount of time and effort required to do something useful can change.

>Who cares what the stack is and how many layers of libraries there are?

Exactly.

Can I get on with this person who will be my boss and these other people who I will sit next to for eight hours a day? Do I prefer JavaScript or Python?

One of those questions is much more important than the other.

I think it’s the latter. Aerospace engineers do have fads like the aerospike rocket engine. Nobody’s launched one (that I know of) because it simply doesn’t work yet. The cost of failure is just too catastrophic. Instead, there’s a focus on the tradeoffs and lots of experimentation to get it right.

In software, if the prototype didn’t work, you tweak it and try again or even deploy with known issues and fix in prod later (looking at you game companies). If you had to throw away all your code and start over completely with each iteration like you do with rockets, you’d see more discussion and testing out earlier (in fact, you tend to see this more in critical software —- eg, the software that controls those rockets).

Finally, very few companies throw as much money behind business software as they do at rockets. I’d bet heavily that v8, .net, hotspot, or even gcc (metaphorical engines for your code) have only a fraction of the resources spent on a new rocket design.

One thing - software engineering is harder to measure than hardware. Have a new wing design ? Amazing strength at low weight - you can actually test your design and measure if it’s better.

Software engineering is much muddier

learned lisp and ML in the 80s. agree completely.

Exactly this - people spend more time talking about frameworks than solving problems sometimes - the framework will not solve it and people have built huge / successful apps w rudimentary stack

I realize replying to yourself demonstrates poor taste... But I'd like to add that at the time of the interview I had software I had personally designed at companies like DirecTV, Samsung, LG, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Google and Applied Materials. I literally had products at Crestron, Denon and Monster, and one product that could be purchased nationally at Best Buy.

This might be somewhat of an aberration (I hope it isn't, as I'm in the same boat, but it might be). A bunch of people got laid off during the pandemic and now everything is opening up and everyone is hiring and they've become more desperate for talent.

At least in theory. I have noticed a hesitance on some employers to actually bump their ranges for wages, and have had several recruiters tell me their client's budget for the role is criminally low, no wonder they're having trouble hiring people.

I get messages from recruiters based on the very last thing I'm doing, even if I just started doing it in the last 6 months. I got the impression recruiters rarely read the LinkedIn profiles.

I assume that either most of the people decline right off the bat, or they have a very low cost of processing candidates, because that surely doesn't seem to be a very precise way to look for the right people.

>based on technologies I haven't used in a decade

Pretty sure most recruiters don't read beyond "keyword exists".

$ grep android resume.txt && send_email

Frequently cited but a fatally flawed study:

> The first thing they noticed is that the raw tabulations showed women doing worse behind the screens. But perhaps, Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse explained, blind auditions “lowered the average quality of female auditionees.” To control for ability, they analyzed a small subset of candidates who took part in both blind and nonblind auditions in three of the eight orchestras.

>The result was a tangle of ambiguous, contradictory trends. The screens seemed to help women in preliminary audition rounds but men in semifinal rounds. None of the findings were strong enough to draw broad conclusions one way or the other.

>So where did Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse get their totemic conclusion that blind auditions dramatically improved the success of women candidates? After warning that their findings were not statistically significant, they declared them to be “economically significant.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-auditi...

I'm 26 and I still can't grow a beard. I still have some patches that hair doesn't even grow in.

But at least I'll have a full head of hair by 55 so that's cool.

Also I am conscious of not using my not very dank “can has cheezburger” memes

You're right, jQuery alone, even when it was all the rage, wasn't enough for a frontend application.

Backbone, Marionette, eventually Angular and all the rest were huge improvements. You needed a message passing / routing framework, and the new frameworks have consolidated that and improved on it.

Older developers are sometimes more conservative. Sorry. And age leads to cognitive decline. Reality is reality. I'm an older engineer, and even if things are stacked against me, I'm ok with that. It's a consequence of the brutal shift in cultural education around the craft. I hope more creative individuals flourish.