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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

Having seen this happen several times in my social circle over the past 5 years or so, there’s a high end talent pool you can tap with limited resources. I know a few folks maybe 5-10 years older than me (so mid to late 40’s) who have had impressive careers (e.g. their names are associated with popular industry techniques or otherwise recognised as heavyweight contributors) but are just burned out doing the same boring problems. Several have taken massive pay cuts to go work in tiny firms.

These folks by virtue of their commercial history can be useful in ways beyond just coding too - some of them can add a level of glitz, glam and respectability to your firm that you might struggle to figure out for yourself (they’ve seen it all before - they know what kinds of small firms are attractive to people with budgets in big firms).

You can get these folks for a song by:

    1. Giving them something interesting to work on
    2. Showing them that they won’t gradually be asked to take on BS assignments over time
    3. Letting them take every friday to go fishing or whatever it is they do

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1. Giving them something interesting to work on 2. Showing them that they won’t gradually be asked to take on BS assignments over time 3. Letting them take every friday to go fishing or whatever it is they do

#1 would have been fine, for me. When I left my job (after 27 years, running a C++ image processing shop), I was looking for work that was interesting to me. I had my retirement set, and would have been quite happy to take a good deal less than many.

I have a pretty vast and varied skillset. I'm not famous, and never have been interested in that stuff, but I did work for a very well-known company, at a pretty deep level. I had an almost "perfect match" of skills for a startup (and I didn't mind taking a bit of a risk, as my retirement was set, anyway). I was looking for places where I could make a difference.

I also have an enormous portfolio of work, so there's absolutely no question at all, about what I can and can't do. Take fifteen minutes, browsing some of my repos, and it will tell you a lot more than some "Draw Spunky" leetcode test.

I was appalled at the way that I was treated -even by small shops (actually small shops and recruiters were the worst. Big shops treated me fairly well, but didn't have a compelling draw). I have come to learn that this was directly because I'm older. I was unaware of the animosity so many young folks have against us; but I am now painfully aware of it.

In my case, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired; whether or not I want. I found some non-profit folks that couldn't afford to pay me, and I work with them. I pop out a couple of small apps; from time to time; just to stay in practice, while I work on bigger stuff.

> I have come to learn that this was directly because I'm older. I was unaware of the animosity so many young folks have against us; but I am now painfully aware of it.

I think it's less animosity and more incompetence.

I remember once when I was younger - around ~26 - being interviewed by a ~22 year-old fresh out of college, and the interview was more like a college test.

What relevance did this have to what I would do at the company? Most likely - nothing.

But this was basically all this person knew.

The younger you are, the less ability you have to 1) know what's valuable, and 2) assess it.

Not that this is a particularly easy thing for anyone to do.

That being said - younger people are going to place close to no value on your decades of battle scars and experience. They don't have any. They probably like to think it's not worth anything - because it makes them feel better about not having it.

You know - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

I'd also caution on the things you perceive to actually be animosity - they're probably mostly jealousy. You're someone who has WAY more options available - so you can be demanding and picky about your employer. Younger people might hate that - but that's really jealousy. They probably don't actually hate you. There's a big difference.

I was a younger, inexperienced tech lead sitting in on an interview led by an engineer about 10 years older than me.

I was shocked when he spent the whole hour asking soft questions like “So describe your previous team structure. How did ideas and plans arise? Who took responsibility? How was conflict resolved? What were your impressions?”

I always went hard on technical stuff when interviewing, was always worried that an incompetent would sneak through.

I asked the senior engineer his rationale. He told me “This guy went to X school and got Y degree and worked at Z company. So I know he’s smart enough. And I can teach him to write good software. But I can never teach him not to be a prick.”

I think people say that and interview like that till they get a bad hire.

I interviewed like that for 25 years.

I did get a couple of "bad hires," but never for tech reasons.

To be fair, all the other interview rounds were with more junior, low-EQ CS nerds like me, so he could still be pretty confident the candidate would get a good grilling.

Good point.

An anecdotal observation: working at a startup, I found that they were able to get some highly experienced developers, but had filled most of the management positions with young, inexperienced people. I didn't see ageism, rather than just bad management that didn't understand how to work with experienced people because they had this beginner notion that managing means "telling what to do" instead of coordinating. I suspect that kind of behavior is at the root of challenges like you saw, junior "leaders" who think they have the be the superior of other teams members because of some notion of hierarchy.

I’m over 50 and recently did a job search and I have to say this wasn’t my experience. I had to do all the same coding tests etc that all the other candidates did but I never felt like I was treated with disrespect. Maybe I just got lucky or maybe it was because the tech job market was still extremely frothy but I was braced for a bad experience that never came.

I'm glad to hear it.

I suspect that part of the reason is that the smaller shops I looked at were based in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn's agesim is much worse than Silicon Valley. Also, I was interested in the kinds of startups that are probably dominated by energetic younger folks. I do native Swift (Apple) stuff, and have a lot of experience with things like SDKs, and hardware control/communication.

The bigger shops tended to have a lot less interesting work, but were also a lot more "stolid" in their approach to recruitment.

Like I said, I was looking for work that I found interesting. I'm sure I would have been able to find work that was less motivating.

As it has turned out, what I'm doing now, is highly motivating, and I no longer have a desire to go back to the rat race. In the aggregate, I'm glad things turned out the way they did. A couple of startups missed out, but I'm sure they'll be OK. I'm not God's gift to programming. I know that I am doing great.

>Brooklyn's agesim is much worse than Silicon Valley

Is that a Brooklyn/hipster thing, or a NYC finance culture thing seeping into the tech world?

That’s a good question, and I’m not entirely sure. I have ideas why, but I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate. It’s not like anyone is actually willing to change things.

In my experience, “classic” companies (which now include former “rebels,” like Meta, Google, and Apple) are more likely to be professional and courteous (we won’t talk about IBM, though), when it comes to dealing with older folks.

I’ll bet that my experience as a manager also spikes my chances. I have no interest, whatsoever in being a manager again, but it gave me some great viewpoints and experience with things like strategy and pitching.

> I’m over 50

> I had to do all the same coding tests

I don't know man.

I've worked with people my age that stopped updating their skillsets literally decades ago so I don't think it's fair to expect employers to take your abilities on faith.

I also deliberately avoided companies known for leetcode style interviews although I can do those kinds of tests too.

> I don't think it's fair to expect employers to take your abilities on faith.

I have a current portfolio that is massive.

In fact, I just got done updating several apps and packages, so it's current as of about five minutes ago.

I wouldn't dream of taking me on faith. I never did, as a hiring manager, but I was also fairly good at evaluating folks. I would have killed for the kind of info I can provide; which makes it really weird, that people immediately dismiss it.

In any case, that's all water under the bridge, these days. Barn doors, horses, etc.

I also only interviewed for 100% remote positions at startups, mostly doing fairly common React/Rails kinds of stuff so we might have been targeting different markets.

In any case if you're financially in a position that you can work on whatever you want it sounds like things might have worked out for the best despite the unpleasant interviewing experiences?

Yeah. I had to get pushed out of the nest. I wouldn’t have done it on my own.

I’m not gonna be zipping around in a Bentley, but I live humbly, anyway.

I never realized how important it is to be truly happy with my vocation, until I was forced into it.

Completely agree. I recently left a top hedge fund, and for a period around 2019, their hiring process got so silly that it could be succinctly described as they only wanted to hire Linus Torvalds to do linux administration. Around this time, a previous boss of mine was back in the market, at least theoretically, and I convinced him to at least have a conversation with my firm. I even spoke with the HR recruiter beforehand, and was like listen, you need to sell Impact here, and not just in dollar terms, but in organizational change, openness to open source, etc... and the HR rep seemed pretty taken aback- they seemed to feel that just the name on the wall should be all thats needed.

It was so ridiculous though, you aren't going to get people that have defined internet standards, started successful companies, invented important things... to come work at a place to bang out Jiras and get beat up over made up deadlines. And on top of that they were being completely inflexible and were not allowing remote work. Even if you pay them 7 figures, most of these types are already independently wealthy and that's not their motivation at that point in their careers.

I had a similar experience with less stellar product history but solid computer science and current practice. Many of those advertising were associated with phones+web .. those people are actively dismissive of previous software development, and leaned heavily on the whiteboard interrogation and control session. What a negative.. meanwhile, I found out that a skilled co-worker on the net, with excellent English, better modern C++ than me, and domain knowledge, was working for about $27/hour USD out of Poland and London. After covid-19, I discovered some abusive contracting companies who were treating young males very harshly and inflating their credentials.

I really did not expect this, I got negative seniority and quick NO from people with money.

Being older requiere adjustments in how you sell yourself, imho.

I think is a losing proposition go to be another "employee", you are a mentor, a consultant, or something alike. Be in the "same" pool than younglings not work because you are not in the range, but playing good the "nice grandpa" can works well, imho.

Also: In the case of small companies is easier to "own" the interview process if is totally pointless or wrong. Take the experience and run with it: If fizbbuzz is on the path, derail the conversation and show something more impressive and how it could be teached to the team (this is by accident something that happened to me in one of my earlier roles long ago: I already bust the first interview and the second time I only remember going for the same company on site (!)... but that time I just sit with one of the developers and talk/code a little about something cool...)

Want to come check out https://parsnip.ai - "Duolingo for cooking?" We're here in NYC.

I really like the idea, do you have plans to release on Android?

I'm as surprised as you to announce that as of yesterday the answer is yes: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/engineering-plot-twist

> but are just burned out doing the same boring problems. Several have taken massive pay cuts to go work in tiny firms.

I hires for a remote office that was near a certain FAANG office. We had applicants out of the FAANG company every week who just wanted out and many even let us know in their cover letters that they were willing to take a significant pay cut.

I know the HN trope is that FAANG jobs are all about doing some LeetCode to pass the interview and then it’s all easy from there, but that’s not actually the norm in FAANG jobs. If you’re collecting a high salary and working for a highly-paid, highly-motivated boss, the pressure is going to be high. It’s not for everyone and a lot of people discover that the high pay isn’t entirely worth it after a few years.

IME: in my career I’m always a bit under or overworked it seems. Getting better at boundaries, but I suspect this is the case for many in our industry. Choose your poison, and realize it may not be what you want your whole life.

Maybe, but that's very unlikely. Usually FAANG workers (I'm one myself) if they are young will move to new hot startups in the hopes of a big pay off at IPO time, or if they are older ,then will take a small pay cut for better WLB (to raise their kids, etc.), the other pattern I have seen is people move to companies that are fully remote or allow working from other countries (digital nomads friendly). One thing many people ignore about FAANG is: you get to choose what project you work on, at least at Amazon and Google, you can work on anything from Finance, Robotics, Retail, and front-end , back-end, etc... Obviously there will be people who quit FAANG for other reason, and just want to be the lead of a small team at a smaller company, etc. Another myth you seem to believe is thinking high pay equates to high pressure or bad WLB , also wrong, plenty of datapoints on sites like Blind, Glassdoor, etc. I do agree is not for everyone, but it definitely worth the effort to get in, you learn a lot, and you get expose to all kind of problems.

Far from heavyweight, I was building innovative solutions for a small consultancy that became more successful and more practised at the same old solutions. Cue same boring problems. I took two years part-time to retrain with an education degree and now teach bright young minds 9-3 each day for 40 weeks a year. Pay cut worth it. All I was asking for at the end, was interesting problems to solve, but now I know that young people are more interesting and more worthwhile than any neural net or optimization problem. My 2c.

So you went from training artificial neural networks to training biological neural networks? The latter takes longer I believe but the biological networks go on to solve much more interesting problems :)

I do wonder what it was specifically that you didn't like training NN's. At least when doing research on NN's, everything is very interesting, as many many aspects of them aren't well understood.

The odd thing is... this works for senior talent too!

The biggest road block I saw with recent job ads is they want 8 hours / day. Companies just don't have the flexibility to take a senior dev at 4-6 hours a day.

Sure they do, they just aren't explicit about it.

If they are not explicit and not explaining this even to the 1st recruiting filter... it means the only way it happens is if you get in the company, do 8 hours for a while, prove your worth, then switch to 4-6 hours. It's a silly dance and takes time.

I did see it once, and even then they just wink-wink approved 6 hours with a reduced pay but legally you were on the hook for 8 hours (at the reduced rate). Flexibility varies...

The element that I've never been sure about that is benefits though. If you are taking 50% time do you get benefits at all, or 50% benefits, or what?

tbh in that context, the wink-nudge "you're 40 hours a week and we have a mandatory no-meetings friday, be sure you don't go do something fun because it'd be a real shame if you missed something important!" is actually potentially a better deal from the employee perspective because it's legally clear that you're a FTE.

You are right, it is a better deal in a way, but it's also a bit iffy. There's no reason one couldn't get the same benefits as a full-time employee while working lower hours. In the end it's all about total compensation and you can adjust pay for that to make sense.

Say more. I'm not sure if you mean mean they'll accept that even if it's not in the job posting; or if you mean they'll tolerate you working for less than you are supposed to without being above-board about it.

It's always worth talking about. I think most companies avoid putting part time explicitly on a job posting because that sends a message that this is a side gig vs. something you should be focused on. I know for sure for the right candidate I'd be open to 30 hours a week or something like that (less than 20 to be fair is where I'd probably draw the line).

I mean there's people who are barely working right now, including many people who are barely working at multiple companies and getting paid for full time employment at all of them. With that in mind, scaling back from 8 hours to 4-6 while still delivering everything you need to deliver seems very achievable. And in many places that level of commitment is the norm - everyone including management is working those reduced hours - companies just aren't spelling it out in their contracts.

I have been surprised at how flexible some places are once asked. I think advertising for the job they show full-time because that's what most people want. Though the majority are indeed pretty rigid.

4 8-hour days instead of 5 would be what I want.

It does seem somewhat rare.

Trying to make your programmers work 40 hour weeks seems so out dated. Sure, a brave few can regularly work for 8 hours straight, but for many after a few hours they’re better off stopping for a decent while.

Just take a remote position, no one knows or cares if you veg out in front of PC for full 8 hours.

That's the bad part though. Engaged problem solving is fun, staying just plugged in and aware enough to please your ass in seat manager is the opposite of fun.

Thank you, you just described me. After spending about 7 years doing deep learning gigs with very high pay, lots of responsibility and pressure, and more hours in my work week than I liked, I recently took a job as an advisor and some Common Lisp development responsibilities and with very reduced working hours. I work 15 hours a week. I have written a few Common Lisp books and my new company is all-in using Common Lisp.

Hey Mark, you had me at "Common Lisp" so i googled and i had a skim through https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp - it looks right up my street. Over the past couple of months I've taken to coffee breaks in the garden with lisp / scheme / clojure books. Books about the size of the little/reasoned schemer work well but stuff like HTDP is hard to balance! Anyway, your section on ql setup & integration with emacs is way better than the official docs having gone through this only a few months ago.

Am i able to buy a physical copy / print on demand? Neither Amazon nor LeanPub are giving me the option (I'm UK based). Waterstones will let me POD your "Common Lisp Modules" book but that doesn't look as relevant for me (someone who's fallen for lisp but still very much learning). I do have a kindle but i've become one of those divisive types who now freely writes margin notes in his books.

Hello Craig, if you can, stick with the PDF/MOBI/ePub formats instead of sending a PDF off to Lulu to print (which is easy enough to do). My eBooks are my hobby and I update them fairly frequently, which is why I stopped selling printed versions.

I forgot about lulu - scooped up a copy via leanpub, thanks Mark

There was a quote from American football player Ray Lewis where he said something like 'you pay me for Monday to Saturday, I give you Sunday for free'.

Coding, solving fun problems I like doing, and even do on my own time. Useless meetings, bureaucracy, driving, and all the other job annoyances is what causes me to start adding multipliers to my salary requirements.

Pretty much this (also remote work and free from big company sameness)

A job is not only a salary. Yes, salary is important, but I wouldn't take a 50% increase to work on a very inconvenient office location with no free coffee.

Also, don't waste the candidate's time with a BS hiring process. You want to bring this person you don't put them under the steamroller. Be gentle.

For a 50% increase I could literally pay someone to chauffeur me to this inconvenient office and also to buy and bring me coffee from my favourite coffee shop, and I’d still be taking home more.

If the commute takes an hour each way, I don't really care if someone's driving me if that's two extra hours away from my family (and likely missing dinner every night).

I agree with you on the coffee but not the commute.

I had a long commute for a few years -- 9 hour workday with 3.5 hour round-trip commute, 5 days a week. I traded ~50% of my free time for ~50% more salary.

After factoring in commuting costs, taxes, and the time-saving services for things I used to do myself it wasn't as much of a net increase as I thought it would be.

But more importantly, what's the point of having money if you don't have time to use it?

Money is not important, but only after you have enough of it first.

If we want more of this we need to get housing under control. If you can pay a mortgage from 25-40 and finish paying a house then lots more people will be willing to take pay cuts for better jobs at 40. With high homeownership rates among developers it’s difficult to have this happen with modern 25-30 year mortgages.

Or you could give them a cash signing bonus enough that after a year with you they'll no longer feel economically precarious and just... own that they may be a bit flaky forever after.

I had really hoped to be hired in at Mozilla when I interned, since unlike many other companies, they paid a relativey decent wage then pay out cash rather than only give stock in "The Company" (then extort you over 2 to five years to break the internet and or the law, as your rent goes from an excessive 1500ish USD when I was last spending the summer in Frisco, to more like 4500 for a similar sized studio like I'd been looking into today.)

That combined with folks who know words like "schadenfreude" or "Neue Deutsche Härte" but not "cash for keys" or "duty to mitigate loss" can really grind the gears of folks who don't have the resources nor inclination to let neoliberals or worse "save face".

> I was last spending the summer in Frisco

What do the Dallas suburbs have to do with this discussion?

Apparently “Frisco” never went out of style among the African American community in SF.

https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/dont-call-it-fris...

For God’s sake don’t say Frisco to anyone below 70.

[redacted]

There isn't any manipulation going on there what the parent comment suggests. When a business is cash strapped it does not have the funds to compete with salaries. However, the business can offer other benefits such as what the parent comment says and these are a benefit alternative to the mundane jobs and tasks an enterprise may have. The prospective engineer can absolutely decline the offer. I feel like you miss the point of being cash strapped. You can't just create funds out of thin air at any time. The parent commenter did not even suggest you perpetually exploit the engineer.

[redacted]

Being in the lower age bracket of OP, I have to agree with OPs point. There is quite a considerable pool of experienced, motivated and not career, and no longer really money motivated, people out there. We can be had by all OP said. I'll add an incomplete, and highly personal, points: 1, give us hard problems to solve with smart people 2, spare us corporate BS, careerists and all that 3, listen to us and give us aithority to decide things 4, don't have us report to some people who's only professional experience is in your young start-up

Good news, we are avaiable on all levels in the hierachy. Less on C-level, or even just VP, but we are there. And to be honest, to get your company of the ground the last thing you want is an accomplished VP from big corp in your industry. Those career politicians are best suited for your board.

> but the characterization of appealing to burned-out engineers, especially older folks,

It's not just "older folks" that are burnt out from being effectively abused by employers for years or decades. I left my last employer after just shy of 16 years as I didn't have a cost of living increase in over a decade, worked over 400 hours of overtime in a calendar year and was constantly being asked for more, with every single thing I did being micromanaged with a time stamp down to the second with it going as far as some managers asking employees to notify them when they'd be AFK to use the toilet to justify a few minute gap in activity, while my CEO gave himself a 40-something million dollar annual raise (while being a multi-billionaire).

In the past year and a half roughly half of that office has quit, heck when I put in my notice one of my team leads had put his in day before and the one I directly reported to put in his the day after I did.

People are tired of being treated like crap, with or without "enough" pay.

Sometimes being trusted, being treated like an adult, and being given some amount of freedom is far more attractive than more money.

It seems like "older folks" in tech is like older folks in the NFL. Around 30. You can get pretty grizzled / salty pretty fast with bad environments.

I don't know. From talking to them, they seem really happy with the deal.

One example - one of the original creators of a mega-popular open source enterprise messaging product, that product is the defacto standard in its space, he created it around 2007-ish with 4 other folks. Today i don't see his name on recent commits but i'd be pretty sure he's still involved on the apache project board or something. He was a lead developer in a big org at that time but then levelled up to MD level over the course of a decade or so.

He builds houses now (not a typo - a moderately famous programmer who now has his own house building company), he teaches elderly folks in his community how to use the internet without falling to scams and he cranks out code for 2 startups on a part time basis.

From the things he engages with today it seems to me that he's not chasing money (he could walk into a mid 6-figure MD level role tomorrow if he relocated back to NYC) but fulfillment.

Another example, one of the most skeptical people i've ever met, i just can't imagine a scenario where someone manipulates him but anyway, he's maybe a year into pairing up with a fintech startup and best i can guess, he's paying them. I.e. i'm pretty sure he's invested money in them and i can't imagine they're providing his previous salary. He relocated so i only see on social media these days but he certainly appears to be having a blast of time and i've never seen him in as high spirits.

If it was manipulation then i'd be expecting to see underhanded tactics but that's not the suggestion here. The suggestion here is to meet demand for more interesting job roles with better flexibility for life and in return get the benefit of a top level developer in your org.

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