Hacker News Reader

Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

I think at one point in America's history, Long-Term-Unemployment(LTU) was a semi-decent indicator of a possible problem-employee because nobody was questioning "Is college worth it?". Back then, you were pretty assured that your degree(whatever it was) guaranteed you a job... so if you didn't have a job for a long time, then either you're a lady who became a mom or you're a man who messed up in life. But today, especially after 2008/9 real-estate mess, a bunch of totally legit people fell into LTU by no fault of their own... but the stigma still remains.

I also think this is more a problem for non-tech jobs. In today's world, if a software-engineer wanted to travel the world for 8 months I suspect she could easily get a job when she's done. She'd probably be getting recruiter-calls while on vacation.

View on HN

I just did that. I turned 50 last year and took about 9 months off to travel the world. When I came back, I posted my resume online and had a job within days. And there's nothing special about my resume, mostly just .Net web programming, though I'm admittedly fairly good in the technical interview.

The only place I sensed age discrimination were the places I wouldn't work anyway, the crazy "we expect 65 hours a week" shops.

I don't know. I can't tell if the phenomenon of ageism in tech is under or overrated, but I do think that techies have the advantage of never truly being out of work, so long as they're hacking away at something.

In fact, older LTU workers could learn from the tech strategy of consulting and freelancing when "gaps" in their careers emerge. So long as you have something to show for it, such as a new skill or someone in your network that can raise their hand and say, "Oh yeah, she mentored me through this big project my company is working on" then you can help yourself out a bit.

I want to know how much of this is HR's fault. What the hell are they looking for, and why? Everyone admits this is a problem, but HR goes on as if they're oblivious to it. And then you read about how they're dismissing candidates that don't have an adequate social media presence, and you begin to wonder why on earth these goons run hiring.

I can't tell if the phenomenon of ageism in tech is under or overrated

It's bad in VC-istan but I don't think it's bad in technology as a whole. There are plenty of 50+ programmers at places like Google who are well-regarded.

The fear that many of us who are in our 20s and 30s is that the culture of age discrimination-- one that we, although young, really don't support, but that is inflicted upon us by the VCs-- will get worse in the next decade or two. Right now, it's not apocalyptic and most good programmers will be fine. The concern is that if VC-istan becomes the new normal in employment, ageism will be more of a problem when we get to 40+. Right now there are still a lot of good jobs for 40+ programmers at the Staff+ SWE level at places like Google and Amazon, but that won't be true if VCs acquire more power.

Everyone admits this is a problem, but HR goes on as if they're oblivious to it. And then you read about how they're dismissing candidates that don't have an adequate social media presence, and you begin to wonder why on earth these goons run hiring.

HR looks for reasons to reject people. They have to, because they get so many junk resumes. They cut for too old or too young or too long at the last job or too short at the last job. You need, whenever possible, to engage with people who are looking for reasons to accept people.

HR looks for reasons to reject people. They have to, because they get so many junk resumes.

I'm a good developer at a good job and not that old. A few years ago I was in transition between a several-year volunteering engagement and work in the private sector, and the job search took a while. I got very few interviews at the time. I would have been an asset to any decent employer that hired me. I do not think the resumes I submitted were junk.

There appear to be structural changes underway that are making the job market volatile for a range of people, especially the long-term unemployed. I am not sure where it is all heading.

I do not think the resumes I submitted were junk.

Not all rejected resumes are junk, but there's a flood of resumes from unqualified people who send out 100 per day.

It's like dating. The more damaged people engage in more activity, so you encounter a biased sample. If the good people send out 5 resumes per job search, targeted toward specific employers fitting their skills, while the unqualified send out 200 (in the hope of getting lucky) then you'll have a 40:1 overrepresentation of the bad.

You were probably a victim of the junk, because when there are so many junk resumes flying around, good people get lost in the shuffle.

There appear to be structural changes underway that are making the job market volatile for a range of people, especially the long-term unemployed. I am not sure where it is all heading.

Yes, that is very true. I don't know, either. In the next 30 years, society will need to establish a basic income just to be marginally stable, because there's no other way to pay for the periodic retraining people need as one job ends and another begins.

>because there's no other way to pay for the periodic retraining people need as one job ends and another begins.

Companies used to train people. I'm actually a basic income proponent for similar reasons, among others. But when you put it like that, why should the taxpayers foot that bill and not the companies that reap the value?

But when you put it like that, why should the taxpayers foot that bill and not the companies that reap the value?

The companies won't foot the bill. They'll just hire very young people with the relevant training or send the work overseas.

Technology is more about job replacement than destruction. The problem is that few companies are willing to train people up. The world is unfortunately too big for there to ever be a real labor shortage (at least, in the next 30 years).

In other words if your career is in any way unusual, the HR folks don't want to let you in. They have no way to judge a resume by objective standards because they haven't got a clue about the work being done in their company. So they rely on hiring people who conform to some fantasy of what a modern company employee should be like.

In my experience, the hiring managers have been the problem, not HR. I've been very frustrated by my managers' attitudes and expectations when trying to hire folks for my team. They've rejected resumes against my recommendations. And after interviews, they've declined to offer jobs to people that I thought would be great fits. And then they continue to complain to their managers that we just aren't getting quality candidates. Not true!!! And again, this is not HR. . .these are the hiring managers.

No worries, it's quite clear to me that the VCs won't acquire any more power.

Interesting. Why do you say that?

The situation is that hiring is determined by managers, that is to say people who define success as moving into management as quickly as possible. They see someone who hasn't "made it" in a long career of remaining hands-on and by their value system that person is a failure.

> And then you read about how they're dismissing candidates that don't have an adequate social media presence...

Is this a real thing? I'd like to know more.

HR facilitates but it's the hiring managers - i.e., the people who will actually manage the new employees - who define the requirements. So, the managers have the crazy expectations, not HR.

>I also think this is more a problem for non-tech jobs. In today's world, if a software-engineer wanted to travel the world for 8 months I suspect she could easily get a job when she's done.

My sister did just that and landed a job immediately upon returning.

I did the same thing (~2 years), but then it took three months and five rejections (including flying to four offices) before a compatible offer materialized. I was getting worried and kinda running out of money. Whoops.

I had a long job search once (long story) and what surprised me was that the rejections weren't the biggest confidence killer. Far worse were the lowball offers and too-junior positions that just felt like D+'s. Those were harder to get over.

I can deal with not being hired for lack of fit, but at my age being offered a junior position is an insult. There are plenty of reasons someone might not hire me and many are neutral (position filled, bad day on my end or theirs) but a crappy offer at least feels like a statement.

Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly? Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions?

Or am I just assuming programmer, and you're actually something else?

There's junior in social standing and junior in official position.

If you're told your boss manager will be a 23 year old who was BFFs with the founders all growing up, and you are 35 with 15 years of experience, that's kinda degrading.

If you're a 30 year old with 10 years of experience and you're being offered less than what an undergrad gets entreating into facebook or apple or google ($30k sign on, $50k+ worth of 4-year options to start out with (which will easily be added to so you can cash out $500k to $1M within 6-8 years)), that's kinda degrading too.

Sometimes your specific experience doesn't match the outside world anymore. Maybe you have eight years experience using Custom Designed Internal Framework that's of no use to the outside world. So, there you sit, being judged along side people with eight years less experience than you because all your experience is "hidden" to the new company, their interview process, and your social peers.

There are many ways jobs and the interview process can make you feel less than stellar.

If that 23 Year old is one of the first engineers and built much of the system then yes, you are going to be junior to them no way around that they most likely earned their spot working crazy hours when the company could barely be called one. There are two sides to every coin, if you want to avoid that then look to join really early companies and be the one that earns the spot by building the system.

Well, the OP seemed to have something specific in mind and I just was wondering what it is.

Of your examples, the one with less money is just less money. I understand issues with a drop in salary, but the reference to "junior position" above seemed to imply more than salary.

On the first, I've been older than my managers for years now. Who cares? I don't want to be a manager, I enjoy programming. I care deeply whether that 23-year-old is a good or bad manager, but that has nothing to do with how old she is.

Less money isn't always less money. I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.

I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.

If you're a professional, your rate is market or pro bono. Anything in-between just gets horrible. Your salary is what it costs the company for management to waste your time. If your salary's low, your time will be wasted.

A salary is paid in exchange for an employee's time, which implies that when management has employees sitting idle or otherwise misdirects their energies, the salary is what it costs to continue doing so. But I would not characterize a salary as the cost of wasting an employee's time--just the cost of their time. But you seem to suggest that ceteris paribus, a market salary is the minimum for which a similarly employed person would be indifferent to being kept idle. Perhaps this holds for a small interval dt. I lack the intuition that employee preference matters.

wasting an employee's time

In the sense of "meaning of life stuff" (fulfillment, meaning, purpose, etc). Your salary is what you charge someone to make you do things you wouldn't normally do. Sometimes, especially in "tech," jobs and natural interests align. In the normal world, that isn't always so.

Junior Position is a euphemism for "job that's not going to pay market rates". My experience in tech is that most true "junior" roles are covered by internships...

I think that getting a good junior engineer experience is rare and hard unless you start and land in the exact right place. If you attend Stanford or Harvard and your CS professor is a friend of someone VP-level in your company, then you'll still be "junior"-- at market-fair entry-level rates-- but you're going to be groomed to grow quickly and have a lot of freedom to travel the organization as you look for a fit that matches your talents and will enable you to rise quickly. If you're anyone else, your junior programmer years are every-person-for-him/herself and unless you fight hard (and job hop) you will get stuck doing the dreck that no one wants to do, that you don't learn from, and that shits all over your career.

At Google, if you attended Stanford and landed in the Mt. View office (the office being more important than the school) there was, even when I was there, a decent chance of getting a legit SWE-2/SWE-3 experience that would train you to make more of yourself, and make promotions (up to Staff) basically ensured so you could focus your energy on actually learning and becoming a great engineer.

Yeah, I agree with you. My career started at MSFT long ago and gained good experience quickly...so if you happen to land at a top tech company, you'll get the right experience. I think this goes for almost any high-end career, too.

But as it is now, I see a lot of companies seeking Junior-level positions, but with big expectations and knowledge requirements. Everything except wanting to pay a proper salary.

Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly?

I'm 30 with 7 years of experience. I wouldn't say I'm a top-1% programmer (probably top 5%, possibly 2%) yet but I'm a really good data scientist and I've seen a lot of different corporate environments. Also, being a Lisper (but also knowing well the virtue of static typing, having worked on production Ocaml systems) I have good taste. There are still some holes in my knowledge (I was a math major, not CS) but I'm filling them pretty quick.

I wouldn't take a job where my day consists of being handed bugs or small features in some large project where the decisions were already made. Someone else can churn tickets, I'm past that point in my career. I'm not a prima donna. In the short term (say, two weeks) I'll do what is required no matter how unglamorous. But in the long term (3+ months) I'm not going to work in a role that's incoherent with my career objectives.

I only work in roles where I get to make some of the technical decisions, because if I'm purely in an implementation role, I won't learn anything. I generate ideas and implement them; if I'm only doing the second of these, then the work is meaningless to me. If the project is big and complicated-- say, 2.1 to 2.3 in difficulty on this scale: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... I'd probably be doing that under light supervision and that's fine, but if I'm not engaging in a learning process and in control of what I work on, then I'm wasting my time at this age.

Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions?

Senior programming is different from junior programming. As with writing, there are varying forms of it and they have different flavors that might not be obvious to those who don't do it on a daily basis.

A junior programmer fixes bugs and implements features that come downstream from executives, product management, and more senior programmers. There's a lot of value in that experience, if it comes with mentorship, when you're starting out. But when you get to my level, the quickest way to learn is to do things and find out directly what works and what doesn't.

A senior programmer gets to set priorities, generally has a lot of autonomy over what he works on, and has input (and, often, final say) in product and architectural decisions.

It's not about title, as it were. There are plenty of people with "Senior" in their title who are junior in terms of how they work, and there are others without fancy titles who are de facto senior.

Thanks for the clarification.

But, you know, in context, there's a huge difference between not finding a job and not being able to easily make the next step up in your career.

At 7 years, you just don't have much senior experience (that's a comment about years, not knowledge or talent). 7 years is a lot of programming experience, it's just not a lot of senior dev or team lead experience.

It's a good career move to insist on this in your next position, and I'm not doubting that you're capable of it, but that puts you in a completely different category than somebody who can't find work at all or somebody who's been a senior dev for 20 years and can't find a position.

One thing to be aware of is that a lot of shops, myself included, almost never hire senior/leads directly. I'll pay your salary request, but no matter who you are, you're going to spend a couple of months on somebody else's project before you lead your own, just to understand the code base, the team, the tracking and VCS systems, the culture in general. We may have an understanding that you'll lead the next big project if you don't flame out, but you're still going to have to spend some time down in the code trenches.

it's just not a lot of senior dev or team lead experience.

In the traditional world, yes. But what about our wacky tech world where the 22 year old is a founder/ceo/manager of the entire company? Are you less experienced and knowledgeable that that person?

I agree with your part about not hiring externally for new internal projects though (unless all your other internal projects are horrible and you need new blood to get out of institutional brain damage).

Ha! I was approached by an in-house recruiter for a startup who advised me to revise my resume. He said that my resume reflected someone with a scientific programming background (the position I was aiming for) as opposed to the dev ops background needed for the low-paid dev ops position they were looking to fill.

Yeah, I was having trouble finding a job in late 2008 when the market got really weird, and a recruiter was the one who clued me in to my resume problems. I'd never really had any trouble finding a job before, so I didn't have a lot of resume-building expertise.

I didn't have resume problems--I had a recruiter call me out of the blue and complain that my resume was for something other that the position he was attempting to fill!

I would take this as a compliment, if it weren't a poorly paid position.

You're right. They discerned ability already present in the more primitive and ancient regions of the brain--for them the capabilities associated with more recent evolutionary developments were a distraction. I was subjected to a surprise quiz, in which one of the answers, dredged from a primal race memory, was "mdadm."

To extend your "insult of being offered a junior position" line, sometimes engineering interviews will test for willingness to leave or bouncing aroundy-ness. But it's always a losing game if you're a candidate over 40, ISTM, because even if you are just fine with a junior position and eager to accept their offer and get to work, they often perceive you as someone who will bounce as soon as a better offer comes along (and of course, if you're not fine being a junior just to get back in the game you wouldn't be talking to them).

Three months isn't really that bad. They used to say the rule of thumb was one month for every ten thousand you expect in salary. And that's in a "normal" economy.

Yes, I just took 18 months off work, and I'm finding that no one cares. Seems like the fact that I can code is plenty of reason to hire me.

It's a really, really good time to be a programmer. I don't know how long it's going to last, but it's really good right now. I recently took 2.5 years off (during which I worked on my own technical projects, which helped a lot), and not only did I get a lot of recruiter interest during that time, once I started seriously looking for a job again, it only took about one month to get exactly the job I had been fantasizing about for years. They asked about my time off, but they asked really politely, as if they were afraid of putting me off.

I'm curious, what's the job you were fantasizing about for years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com