They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
"Isn't that what you hired me for?"
Discussed here a couple of times as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361947 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).
Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).
People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.
I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
I try not to be comic book guy these days. I was in the past. I just want to learn together with people. That is all.
I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.
My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.
I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.
I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)
If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.
We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!
I am in my 50's and I think the biggest discrimination I notice is not specifically age-related but cost-related. I am very expensive, a recent grad is not. Lots of companies think (some are right) that they can do well with the recent grads and are unwilling to shell out what it costs to hire me.
For context I’m 51. I’ve made the trade off of making less than I hypothetically could if I worked at larger companies/BigTech (been there done that got the t-shirt for almost four years until 2023).
while this is certainly not age discrimination I was just making a point that what sometimes looks like age discrimination it may not actually be that.
and most of the good money is definitely not in “big tech” (though too many people in our industry think that…)
Where exactly besides BigTech and equivalent can a college grad make $170K+ straight out of college and easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
Youngsters aren’t “worth” much of anything. They do negative work starting out.
I apologize if I sounded like I am pitching people should stay un-employed, I re-read my comment and I don’t think that I did. I would probably take lower paying job temporarily (not at this point in my career but when I was younger). however though, the 1/12 or 1/6 or 3/12 might sound significant but taking below-your-worth will probably end up worse in the long run if you stay long enough
> … easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
I think you are talking outliers and not for majority, not everyone working in “big tech” will make a mill in 4 years. but to answer your question, I made more in my first 4 years (not even inflation-adjusted) and this is 1999-2003. you can do it in several ways, the two I would recommend:
1. government contracting for a year or two (work your ass off and make top govies happy) then going solo or start your own firm when the contract is up
2. find a company that has been in the business for say 20+ years and has been profitable and has no more than 150 employees. in the first 1-2 years work your ass off and specifically volunteer to work on the worst shit most shy away from, the hardest problems, the worst parts of the codebase, ones that say // do not touch this, no one knows how it works. after some time it’ll be you that everyone turns to when hard problems need to be solved and further you will reach a point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. there may be a handful of such people in “big tech” (if that). once you get there you can go 1099 and charge just about anything you want.
overall, treat your self as corporation and every employment not as “I am slaving away for ____” but partnership between two corporations and career gets a lot better than working at “big tech”
The total compensation target at Amazon is based on
Year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% of your total stock package
Year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% of your total stock package
Year 3 and 4 - base + 20% of your stock vest every six months.
Usually around year 3 you get more stock.
Even an intern I mentored when I was ProServe their from 2020-late 2023 got a 600K four year initial package when they graduate and they got promoted to a mid level L5 in year 3 and will make around $750k-$800k depending on vesting schedule and price of AMZN when the offer was made over 4 years. ProServe (the internal consulting division ) and SAs make around 10% less than software developers.
My four year initial package was for $850K as a mid level consultant - I only had two years of AWS experience at the time. It was supposedly a “field by design” and permanently remote. They had an RTO mandate 6 months after I left - and had moved to Florida partially to save on taxes (no state tax)
GCP pays their senior consultants - full time employees around $250k -$280K
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/solutions-c...
Again they make less than software engineers
As far as “working my ass off” and going 1099, that was never appealing to me. I worked at AWS ProServe like I said for almost 4 years (full time) and now working as a staff consultant (full time) for a third party consulting company - cloud + app dev.
I like not having to worry about sales, accounting, benefits, chasing payments etc.
I like knowing that I can work 40 hours a week and money appears in my account on holidays, when I’m sick, on the bench, on vacation, etc.
As far as taking “any” job. When I was Amazoned in 2023, my goal was crazy enough to get any remote offer that wasn’t at a large company before my paid vacation reimbursement was up (9 days) and well before I started using my 3.5 month severance let alone my savings.
I took a full time job at a shitty consulting company, with a 20% pay cut and kept interviewing until I found something I wanted. It took a year to get the job I really wanted at the pay I wanted.
More relevant to old folks - like you and me and the article (I’m 51) - is that with AI and businesses jumping on board the hype train, AWS, GCP and Oracle are still hiring consultants, SAs and sales like crazy as companies are trying to figure out an “AI strategy”.
It’s good to be a shovel seller during a gold rush. Consulting companies and divisions love older people who still have relevant experience and can talk to “the business”
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
as you say, cutthroat
I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.
Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.
Seeing them youngsters come and go faster than batches of recruits thrown into combat at Stalingrad, I no longer care either. Have better things to do than train them so they can jump ship for a higher salary. I only relate to people with whom I can eventually connect over long term and these youngsters ain't it.
I do the same, try to help the young'uns shooting themselves in the foot. I've always enjoyed that part of the job.
It really annoys me that while I feel having the decades of experience to see through hype and the willingness to help newcomers are possibly the most important aspect of being a senior IC, no-one in the current culture care about that or see it as valuable.
places with older people & people with families i.e dads | mothers etc are a pleasure to work with
less bullshit, less time wasting, less chasing non productive hype
however the industry has been decimated lately, so now those places are rare
however I have discovered -- low-key cities tend to have places staffed with experienced colleagues