petsormeat

I was launched about 20' by an abruptly opened car door. The paramedics thanked me for wearing a helmet; they only had to deliver me to the ER for seven stitches caused by that "lip."

> These are people with many employment options.

No, they aren't. The post mentions the lack of prospects many of them have due to visa issues, as well as bias against their gender, age, or race.

Want to reduce the power of problematic employers? Encourage your unproblematic employer to hire people like these.

...while some sales bro seated next to you "to break down silos" is clanging a gong and seeking high-fives, and every 90 minutes you're obliged to trudge into a conference room to discuss yet other math problems that can't reuse the solutions to the previous ones, and the math reference you have is missing 1/3 of its material.

I'm not a parent, yet have never made even 90% of what my male peers were paid.

The "Abbatars" could've been plants, animals, or fantasy creatures. It disappoints me all that tech was used to put them in "youngface" instead.

1966 as well. I can still recall the Tom Lehrer bits about stuff like adverbs, and the go-go eco-groove about "-tion." Truly educational television.

Or your age: https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/older-job-seekers-on-linkedin...

+1 on the use of "stroad." Too much of urban Arizona is ruined by these constructions.

Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids" has terrific detail about daily life in the Chelsea Hotel in the 1960s-70s.

Not asking what the promotion path of my first dev job would be. As it turns out, there wasn't one: I was hired to be a code monkey, and a year and three "annual" performance reviews later, I was still a code monkey, with no change in responsibilities.

Don't be shy about asking what the near future of a role is.

Unsuck-it for quick translations: http://unsuck-it.com/

Same racket for anybody over 40, much less 50. I pay $750/month in premiums just for bronze-level coverage on my middle-aged self.

+1. Everybody's setting up balloon drops and loud publicity stunts for these "let's get girls to code!" initiatives. Nobody's calling serious attention to the lack of female tech leads, directors, and VPs, because that would require uncomfortable investigation into why non-male employees aren't retained and promoted.

This.

As a minimalist related to borderline hoarders, I dread gift-giving occasions. When I give what I would want, it's considered stingy and sparse.

As is Sonoma County, today.

Yeah, I feel like any strenuous backcountry hike I take in the western U.S. will have me encounter at least one Scandinavian by its end.

The most surreal of these developments that I've visited is the Town Square of Copperopolis, California.[1]

It's not visually unappealing, but is a rather odd addendum to a historic 19th c. town which apparently won't suffice for tourists or affluent retirees (not enough parking). It's just as managed and tidy as the developments discussed here. Speakers on light poles blare top 40 hits from the 1950s, for some reason.

[1] https://www.gocalaveras.com/location/california/gold-country...

I miss the Quake City airport shuttle drivers at SFO. They were usually over-educated liberal arts graduates, sufficiently "alternative" in their grooming to thwart their hiring in ordinary jobs (even S.F. employers used to be uptight about that). Spent one ride home getting a useful summary of the latest Terence McKenna book.

>At the same time I noticed that the majority of engineering managers, product owners and agile coaches in our company are women. Some of these women were programmers at some point in their career.

Many women get nudged/pushed into middle management instead of promoted to technical leads or directorships. It's often a way for companies to claim they "promote" women, while forcing them into roles that are vulnerable to layoffs.

I am close to this point, in my early 50s.

I'm still housed, and my home life is okay, which is a damn miracle, since I have been unable to rejoin the supposedly "hot" SF Bay Area tech industry. I can get interviews if I whack 15 years off my web development career on my resume. I don't pass the in-person or video interview stage, because then the employer sees that I'm older than 35.

Many of your points resonate with me intensely. We're not sick, disabled, immoral, nor incapable. We're just unemployed, given too much evidence that our societies consider us useless.

I wish you peace in this wretched time.

Same here; I'm woman, and over 50. I use a landscape snapshot from an enjoyable daytrip for my profile photo. Is this, like removing graduation dates from a resume, an undesired tell?

Not mentioned is whether sprawl has increased the distance between home and workplace, beyond acceptable cycling limits.

I'll confess to admiring the greatly reduced mess of the first pod system I encountered, which was in an SF startup.

Not only were developers given fewer reasons to leave the office, but the non-men on staff weren't stuck with maintaining a coffee service.

My experience (in SF/Oakland for 30+ years) is the same. Trouble is, I've grown so accustomed to it that I probably project the same Bay Area snotty hostility when I visit other places.

Out of curiosity: what do you think when you meet the candidate, and it’s obvious they have much more than ten years of work experience? Is there something the candidate can do to put you at ease?

I’ve noticed some anxious double-takes in interviews after passing hiring filters with my shorter resume.

After 15 years of front-end dev, I now work in retail. Some of my other peers are scraping by with Uber/Lyft. Some are muddling through as housewives or substitute teaching.

And, yes, Bay Area tech hiring is needlessly hostile for men over a certain age as well.

A lot of us drop out mid-career. I'd argue there's more a shortage of female engineering directors, VPs, CTOs.

Oh, there are a bunch of us, even here in the SF Bay Area. Trouble is, we're older than 35, or don't have degrees from "top" schools, and/or don't have the "passion" for bizarre extended hiring rituals. I could staff an entire dev team with non-male people within a week.

Lawdy. Was Sarah Palin her speechwriter?

+1 on social dancing. There are explicit rules about the interaction, which makes it less exhausting than freeform chat.