When I hear people complain it’s hard to hire good software engineers
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I worked for a FAANG, and I thought ageism was a problem there -- I worried that I needed to be financially ready to retire at 50, because I might be unemployable there by then.
Now I'm at a younger company and you're seen as washed up at 35.
I’m in my early 40s now but I’m forcing myself to think about what type of company and team I’d fit into in 10 years. I enjoy working at startups/scale ups. I’m the oldest person in the engineering team now (by over 10 years).
My concern is that even with the best of intentions by an interviewer not to discriminate on age, I worry that I’m going to have to end up at a multinational or consultancy in the future because hiring someone 50+ in a startup filled with 20-somethings would be chalked up as a “culture fit” issue.
It is a deficit of some younger people that they don't value other perspectives, and I think points to a bad work environment.
A medium to large software company never hires 45, a small software company almost never hires 35+.
As for the "bootcamp graduades", there is huge variance in the outcomes, but the median result is very disappointing.
If cooking suddenly became very lucrative and I went to a culinary bootcamp right now, I’d almost surely be a failure at a career change in that direction in large part because for 40+ years of being exposed to cooking, I showed no significant prior interest.
Diversity is undervalued in tech. Many companies have a hiring process that's like an assembly line, and it produces workers who are all the same, replaceable cogs. Managers tend to like this, in theory, but the workforce ends up being less than the sum of its parts, because the workers tend to all have the same biases, all the same weaknesses, all the same strengths, so the weaknesses are magnified, and the strengths have diminishing returns. What you want in a great team is individuals who have different, complementing strengths. And who can cover for each other's weaknesses, because they don't all have the same ones.
> Oddly enough the former chefs we work with are kicking butt - sample size is too small but maybe cooking is a great gateway to coding??
I spent about a year doing short order cooking to put myself through uni, nothing fancy, but I might offer some insight here. Cooking in busy service shifts might transfer well to coding because they demand retaining both a complex, large state in your head with minimal prompting, and update that state frequently with complex flows. Keeping hot food hot, cold food cold, hitting the order all at the same time, meeting the wait people at just the right time, for a baseline steady rate of never less than 5 orders deep simultaneously, peaking to 12-15, and handling emergencies on the fly (running out of sauce pans, spilled food, run out of ingredients, etc.), bears some abstract similarities to coding.
And they do it in uncomfortable, loud conditions, people shouting all the time, tempers flaring from time to time. 4-8 hours a day, five days a week, with few breaks. Think of it as they keep the equivalent of coders' flow state under what coders consider intolerable conditions. For a tiny fraction of the pay.
If you find a chef/cook who can run a crew of 6+ and pull their load as good as or better than any individual member of the crew, then they've got the raw chops to transfer that skill to keep pretty complex representations in their heads. The good ones I've seen intuitively use queuing theory without knowing it. The one caution I'd offer is watch for chronically short attention spans; there is a different kind of grinding in coding especially in debugging that rubs even many in this group the wrong way. Heck, too few coders have mastered that.
I'd like to hear others' experience with people or themselves who got into coding from a different field. My personal anecdata off the top of my head is I've seen a preponderance of military intelligence analysts, farmer/ranchers, and philosophers seem to do well coding.
It is uncommon. I've fallen in with a pretty good team. A few of them formerly worked for a big multinational.
I'm a former philosophy grad student.
Symbolic logic is basically the same as coding.
This is a regrettable culture misfit with the younger devs who do.
I am not sure I understand your point
The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.
That takes time. We call it wisdom. There are no wise young people - only wise beyond their years.
I would advise against bootcamps. We pretty much stopped recruiting from those because the signal to noise ratio was just too low.