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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.

There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.

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Another way to look at it is that naked emperors and snake tongues are leaving a LOT of passion and talent on the table. And customers (we all are, to someone) are similarly yearning for some basic progress, too. How did we get so good at failing to make anything out of that? How can we change it?

And there is no money cushion anyone [0] can leave to future generations that could offset just leaving it to the worst of the worst, the "synergy" of the insane running the asylum with no counter efforts, like pulling all cooling rods in a reactor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice

In that story the sorcerer saves the day. There is no such person in our story, and no group that play its role, and if we don't step up -- all of us, all of "them", everybody -- everything will be "awash", and nobody will "win" anything worth talking about, not on any timescales beyond what I would consider very short term.

Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.

Sure, but using the above comment as reference, I think it is increasingly a lot of things that are off-putting in the industry.

Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."

Perhaps you mean "fire" not "lay off"? Generally layoffs are structured to avoid discrimination risks.

But your performance reviews don’t have anything to do with age, so I don’t see how that could be.

Any review that's not a hard metric can be gamed to be about anything the reviewer cares about.

They don't like your age and prefer some fresh face to pull with no family alnighters and work for half the money? The performance review will show you as lacking motivation or some such shit.

And any review that's based on hard metrics, can be manipulated by the reviewer just as well.

Yeah same. I guess I'll barista FIRE at some point and maybe have some little side projects here and there.

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