
How the Valley treats experienced people - zdw
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/29/age/
======
markbnj
I kind of feel like the author is referring to Zuckerberg's famous comment
about young people being smarter. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was
suitably shocking and stupid so it's a candidate anyway. The thing I like
about Rachel's take on this is that she gets right to the key thing:
regardless of what field you're in, or how you spend your time, the vast
majority of us are going to be neither horrible failures nor amazing
successes. We're far more likely to just be ordinary human beings, who
probably need to earn a living and have something useful to do every day. Fwiw
I'm 58 and a working site reliability engineer and developer. I don't really
live paycheck to paycheck, but neither can I just quit working and go
instagramming about the globe. I'm fortunate to work for a very diverse
company that values everyone for what they can contribute, but I am also
cognizant of the people who will look at me and wonder why the greybeard never
"made it." Those people probably won't "make it" either, and anyway, nobody
seems to wonder why the old Italian guy in the town next to us still gets up
every day and fixes shoes.

~~~
QuantumGood
Zuckerberg said this to attendees at the Y Combinator Startup School event at
Stanford in late March, 2007 [1]

"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated,
adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with
technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on
employment and discrimination law.)

"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to
VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't
know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not
have family."

Chess masters do commonly mention noticing a decline in what might be called
their raw processing power as early as their late 20's, but most results peak
in their mid '30's [2] and some peak in their '40's. (And should spending your
time playing chess be a marker for intelligence?)

But wisdom is in part knowing what is worth working on (such as should you
spend your time playing chess), and that is generally accepted to increase
with experience. For example, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time
they founded their companies is 42. [3]

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-
sma...](https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smarter/)

[2] [https://theconversation.com/anand-vs-carlsen-the-age-
effect-...](https://theconversation.com/anand-vs-carlsen-the-age-effect-in-
the-world-chess-championship-20120)

[3] [https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-
succes...](https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-
startup-founder-is-45)

EDIT: Fixed year of quote reference.

~~~
wutbrodo
EDIT: parent comment edited it from 2017 to 2007. That makes a lot more sense

Yeesh, in 2017? Zuckerberg was really young when he get vaulted into power and
fame, so I've always been a little more sympathetic than most to his various
foot-in-mouth moments[1], particularly in the past. But Jesus, 2017 was _last
year_: how is he such a slow study at this?

[1] I should not that I have some pretty severe disagreements with my
understanding of his worldview and ethics, but I'm speaking strictly of gaffes
here.

~~~
unclebucknasty
Zuckerberg is who he is--the same guy who, in college, called his fellow
students "dumb f---s" for trusting him with their data.

People want to excuse that as youth, but he wasn't an 8 year-old; he was an
adult, with many of his morals formed. A statement like that is not indicative
of immaturity, but insight into character--the way he views himself and other
people--and it also reveals a willingness to use dishonesty to take advantage
of people for his own gain.

In fact, his entire business model is built on the same "dumb f---s for
trusting him" attitude. He has repeatedly monetized the violation of that
trust and continues to do so. It's mind-boggling that people continue to allow
him to get away with it.

This "gaffe" is not evidence of him being a "slow study", but borne of the
same attitude he displayed in college and on many occasions since--one of
superiority and condescension to other individuals and groups.

~~~
oarabbus_
>Zuckerberg is who he is--the same guy who, in college, called his fellow
students "dumb f---s" for trusting him with their data.

I don't really get why people constantly bring this up. First of all he's not
wrong - anyone with a FB account (including myself) is an idiot for trusting
them, and second of all, it's not even really that insensitive. I mean, could
most people here really claim to have never said anything as bad as that in
college?

~~~
nathan_long
It's notable for several reasons.

> First of all he's not wrong - anyone with a FB account (including myself) is
> an idiot for trusting them

First of all, many intelligent people got FB accounts in the early days
because they didn't know / understand the privacy implications. Eg, some of
them surely were college students who went on to become neurosurgeons,
astronomers, doctors, etc. They acted on a reasonable heuristic - "this web
site looks legit, people I know are using it, there appear to be social
benefits, and I live in a country where rule of law is generally enforced, so
it's probably safe enough." So they were not dumb categorically, even if their
decision in this case turned out to be (arguably) dumb.

Second, for _you_ to call the users idiots for trusting FB is one thing. For
Zuckerberg to call them idiots for trusting _him_ is different. A scammer
probably thinks of his victims as idiots, whereas their friends think of them
as regular people who got tricked. The quote sounds like he meant "because _of
course_ I'm going to abuse that trust."

And in context (according to
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg)),
that appears to be exactly what he meant, treating users' information as his
own possession.

> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard > Zuck: Just ask
> > Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS > [Redacted
> Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? > Zuck: People just
> submitted it. > Zuck: I don't know why. > Zuck: They "trust me" > Zuck: Dumb
> f---s

So this quote is brought up not because it shows his insightful analysis of
the fact that generally speaking, people should not trust online services, but
because it seems to show his own intent, from the beginning, to take advantage
of FB users and blame them for trusting him in the first place.

------
shmat
Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of
bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of
going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options.
I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I
had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a
company. I also was a "paper" millionaire during the dot-com boom. The start-
up where I worked was bought making my options worth millions. There was a 6
month lock out and during that time the stock price went from $75 to $0.75. My
options were at $2. Did that make me a bad developer? At another company I had
options at $7. The stock peaked a few years later at $60. I never exercised
any because I was greedy. I was going to cash out when it hit $75. When I left
the company after 6 years, the stock was at $8. All in all, I was almost
always one of the best developers, but I never made "FU" money. I did learn to
exercise options as soon as they were worth a decent amount, but never made
enough to be rich that way. I'm sure there are many old developers who were as
dumb financially as I was.

~~~
rosege
If you are ever in a similar situation you might want to look at what Mark
Cuban did to manage this risk - described here:
[http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-
anat...](http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-anatomy-of-
famous-trade.html?m=1)

~~~
stanfordkid
You can only really do that if you have hundreds of millions and can negotiate
with a major bank to get it done. Most companies don't trade options until
after the lockup, and even if they did, you are restricted from doing so by
the contract.

You also have to put up a huge amount of capital upfront to purchase the
options. For Mark Cuban, this could be done on credit to the bank, but likely
not possible for a single digit millionaire.

It was only during a unique period of irrational exuberance that banks were
open to underwriting options for such new and untested equities.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
> It was only during a unique period of irrational exuberance that banks were
> open to underwriting options for such new and untested equities.

Keep in mind that any time a bank underwrites an option, particularly if it’s
for a short position, there’s no guarantee they will honor it when shit hits
the fan. Legally, they are obligated to. But in practice you may only recieve
a percentage of what you were promised.

------
taude
Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about
Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of
Elitism if you didn't go to MIT or Harvard, too. I'd like to think more about
this and write dome some elegant thoughts, but...

I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's
extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way less
experience and people applying their hiring "playbook" without much thought.
I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people
out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.

Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much
younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are
making in this market. It's almost as if the tech industry wants most of the
people to have two or three years experience.

I've been equating it to working in Hollywood to some.

Still trying to figure out where I went wrong in my career, but as others have
said below, not all startups you work for succeed, not all companies you
create succeed, lock-up periods, senior executive corruption (I worked for a
publicly traded company where the CFO actually went to jail), etc.

~~~
sokoloff
> I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people
> out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.

> Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much
> younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school
> are making in this market.

Which is it? Do you want an older engineer to have the same hiring bar and
same compensation or a higher bar and higher compensation?

Realistically, there should be no "same bar, but higher compensation" option.
If I'm paying you more, it's because you're better, not because you have more
candles on your birthday cake.

~~~
mcguire
"Higher bar, paying less" seems a strange choice, though.

~~~
sokoloff
My experience on the hiring manager side suggests that when that happens,
what's usually going on is that the experienced dev failed to meet the higher
(level 3) bar but seemed like they'd be a solid individual contributor at
level 2, and therefore received a SWE2/PR2/Foo2 offer.

In other words, "same [lower than they expected] bar, same [lower than they
expected] salary" as someone 2-3 years in industry.

~~~
taude
The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of
problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the
teams/projects/products I've lead. Nor are they types of questions that even
measure for engineer work experience and how they approach solving the types
of real world problems that 10 minutes of white boarding a bit counting and
funky array manipulations alg won't show. They are questions that are really
catered towards recent grads who that I haven't think about or practice since
college, and then not getting the job because of that is strange to me.
Especially when they could be asking me interesting real-world technical stuff
like on multi-threading, concurrency vs parallelism, performance optimization,
more solution architecture are parts of the tech stack, project management,
team managements, hiring strategies, dealing with low performers, etc. It's
also humorous when companies aren't doing anything technically sophisticated,
yet their interviewing like they are, for example doing NLP through third-
party APIs, or when the most sophisticated part of their stack is using two
caching solutions with Mem-Cache and Redis, or just writing APIs the
read/write to and from a couple different data storage, systems, etc.

~~~
tacon
I haven't interviewed in a long time, though I read interviewing advice from
Nick Corcodilos at AskTheHeadhunter and it seems to make sense. The basic idea
is to take control of the interview and start _doing_ the work right there in
the interview, just like if you were on your first day of the job. Yes, this
takes all sorts of social skills and preparation, but it sure would make you
stand out from the crowd of software developers. At least the hiring manager
should perk up at such a strategy.

[0]
[https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics5.htm](https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics5.htm)

~~~
refurb
This is actually pretty good advice and I applied it as well. Go into an
interview prepared for the expected questions (experience, behavioral, etc),
but also go in with some well thought out opinions on the day to day work.
I’ve found it makes a big difference even if your opinions are on the naive
side since you don’t have insider knowledge.

------
lisper
I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it.
I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half
a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It
was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview
process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they
asked me to debug some Ruby code despite the fact that I told them well in
advance that I have never worked with Ruby.

There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte.
They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen
anywhere else. There is really only one way to assess someone's ability to
write code, and that is to have them write code in a language and environment
with which they are already familiar. Modern coding is so complex and requires
so much infrastructure that productivity hinges as much or more on the
impedance match between a person and their environment as it does on their
actual abilities. Even the most brilliant coder will stumble if they use emacs
day to day and you force them to use vi.

If you want to assess my ability to come up to speed on a new environment, I
have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or
two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies
don't do that.

~~~
ArchTypical
> There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte.
> They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen
> anywhere else

This looks just like an Ad I see on reddit all over the place.

~~~
dang
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which specifically ask you not to do
this.

If you're worried about abuse, you're welcome to email us at
hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. The guidelines say that too. Would
you mind reading them and following them when posting here?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
ArchTypical
im not going to create an email to anonymously notify the same site who will
review a flagged comment anyway. So, to the process as described, no. I think
the comment was timely and relevant, others just disagree about the utility.

~~~
dang
Ok, but we ban accounts that break the guidelines, so please don't do that
again.

------
samatman
The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m
sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be.
Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one
gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum.

The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty
years now. Even before you subtract programmers who moved into management or
got out entirely, there’s just not going to be that many.

This is more for y’all youngsters who are afraid you’ll be put out to pasture
when you turn $age-you-think-is-old. No reason to think it’ll happen,
experience is useful, you’ll be fine.

Yes, you’ll find some ageist managers out there, who won’t hire you if you’ve
been legally drinking for more than ten years. Good! You dodged a bullet
there, such people invariably have other bad habits.

~~~
zik
This kind of ageism isn't really visible to you unless you're the subject of
it. Yes, it's real.

~~~
humanrebar
For example, I find that technical interviews for experienced developers tend
to be harder, which makes me infer an "up or out" culture. A dev with 20 years
of experience isn't even evaluated for normal individual contributor roles,
instead they are chief code wizard or unqualified.

Younger devs, especially college hires, are given more leeway to train on the
job and grow into their level of aptitude and interest. A similarly
intelligent and driven middle aged dev won't be offered the same chances.

~~~
nikanj
I think there’s an element of expectation there. The college hire might grow
to be a grand wizard in 10 years, and become a massive asset to the company.

It is still possible the older person is going to become a wizard later, but
the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already?

College hires are seen as unscratched lottery tickets, older workers are seen
as known variables.

I’m not saying this is fair or clever, but this seems to be a part of it.

~~~
ahoy
who stays at a company for 10 years?

~~~
jarjar12
Unfortunately I might fall in this category. I am a Sr level
manager/influencer at a Dow 30. Ex-programmer. Been there 7 years. I just got
accepted at kellogg emba. So unless I switch jobs after 1 year I will be this
guy.

One of the reason i got stuck is that 3 years into my job; my ex-VPs, who are
both CTOs now, asked me to build cloud based eCommerce platform for this top 5
online retailer.

where i was I charge of digital transformation for the entire online space
except the infrastructure.

This was 3 year journey. That put it into 6+ year mark.

------
cathames
Luck is a huge part of success. It's mythology that if you work hard enough
for long enough that the world will become your oyster. Sweat and ingenuity
are often necessary but not necessarily sufficient means to financial gain. No
one launches from the same starting line nor runs along the same track. And
don't forget that all the other smart folks out there are ravenously competing
against you for those hotly desired greenbacks. Count your blessings if you
are one of the lucky ones.

~~~
WalterBright
It's not about working hard, and never was. It's about working smart.

And people make their own luck. You can't get lucky if you're not in the game
swinging.

I've known plenty of people who just sat at their desks, doing as little as
possible, waiting for the boss to direct them, reading hackernews(!), watching
the clock till they could go home. They were never going to get lucky.

Then there are the ones who are always up to something. They're doing a side
project, they started a band, they go to meetups, they write articles, they
talk about their investment strategies, they're planning out their next
venture, and you know they're going to get lucky.

~~~
paganel
There’s nothing wrong with being a salaried person, there’s nothing actually
wrong with trying to make a decent buck so that you can have a roof on top of
your head and a computer with access to the internet so you can read HN daily.
I work so that I can read HN (among other myriad things that I enjoy doing), I
don’t read HN so that I can get more money so that I can do... I don’t know
what exactly should I be doing other than reading HN and the myriad other
things I just mentioned that I liked.

“Investing” is hard and very risky work that offers almost no intellectual
benefits (and I’m pretty sure the index-tracking bubble will burst and create
a bigger mess than what happened back in 2008), I’d much rather spend my time
mapping the Byzantine coins found over the Northern Balkans (a nice way to re-
create regional trade routes from about 1000 years ago) or being undecided
whether the people who put the Indo-European “urheimat” just North of the
Black Sea were right or wrong (does Anatolia make for a better choice?).
There’s nothing wrong with holding an ok job that pays the bills so you can
pursuit your real intellectual interests.

~~~
WalterBright
> There’s nothing wrong with being a salaried person

I didn't say there was. I was talking about people who wanted more than that.

------
slics
If one thinks 35+ is to old to code, well I have news for you. At 35+ you
learn how to manage time and prioritize better. Life throws another ranch in
your bucket of problems, marriage and children. When you are young, you are
hired as an engineer to work 40 hours, which we all know very well that
working for startups that means 80 hours or you are not putting good effort.
Well with a family that’s not possible, as you know that 40 hours at work
means that exactly. The rest of the 40 hours are meant to be spent taking care
of your family.

So if one more recruiter doesnt offer the job interview, it’s because they
don’t understand what life is all about. If you have no time to socialize and
network or raise a good family, soon we will be left with a society that only
focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next
generation of smart people. Talent is not born, talent is made and it starts
with a good foundation, called FAMILY.

~~~
pvarangot
I'm 34, left my 7 years relation two years ago, am gay and never thought I
could have kids and am not planning on having kids any time soon. This kind of
thinking about that the traits that one develops with age and experience only
come about with raising a family kind of worries me, I have a pretty good idea
on what I'm missing on since absolutely all my good friends from university
and most of my close friends from my past two gigs are raising kids. I just
don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it. I also think I can manage
time and prioritize better because life did throw stuff at me, just not
marriage and children.

Also, if I feel like it, I can work 80 hour weeks. I just need to rest after
doing it and can't sustain it for too long. I don't know if I can't sustain it
for too long "because of age", or if because of experience I do now realize
I'm doing everything wrong because of burnout, and when I was young I just
powered through doing wrong shit when I was stressed out or sleep deprived and
didn't asses I was doing wrong shit.

~~~
castlecrasher2
> I just don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it.

In my experience there are two kinds of pre-kid people: those who aren't ready
for it and those who lie about being ready for it.

~~~
cozuya
Irritating attitude and assumptions. Even the wording of "being ready for it"
is ignorant. There are many, many successful people who do not have or do not
want or will not ever want children.

~~~
drdeadringer
Like myself, I consider such folks not "pre-kid" but simply "no-kid".

Because not everybody is "pre-kid" by virtue of not wanting kids in the first
place.

------
WalterBright
Sailing the world sounds boring. It's too passive. I'll be working creating
new things until they carry me out in a box.

I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10
days I'm itching to go home and get back to work.

I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind.
I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of
that. I also annoyed the crew by complaining that they'd changed course to
avoid a storm.

~~~
aidos
Must have been a strange sailboat to have an engine room :-)

 _Sailing_ the world certainly isn’t a passive activity, especially if you’re
sailing _around the world_. Ocean sailing involves all sorts of skills (and
nerves) as you need to nurse a boat around while using your ingenuity to solve
the challenges of things breaking that you can’t replace for weeks. You need
to prepare all the food (victualling), learn how to sew sails and teach
yourself to sleep immediately while tied to a bed healed over sideways because
you’re being knocked about in a storm beating into the waves...because you’ll
need to be back up top for your shift in 3 hours time.

Whatever floats your boat, though :-)

~~~
WalterBright
I understand that sailing on the ocean is no small feat, but my problem with
it is it doesn't actually accomplish anything. I want to do things that
matter.

~~~
CPLX
This may be jarring to learn but we all enter the world naked, terrified, and
alone, and fairly shortly thereafter leave the world the same way.

An individual might find meaning from travel, or meditation, or religious
adherence, another from creating a family, another by being the greatest
bullfighter to ever live, or creating an electronic simulation of violent war,
but in none of these examples should anyone be incredibly confident that they
have become an authority on which things matter more than others.

~~~
phkahler
In the end all we have is our story. Make it a good one.

------
kannanvijayan
This is something that has been bothering me somewhat. The following in
particular bothers me a lot:

> "Why are you still working?"

The answer for me is simple - because I want to. I learned how to program at
the tender age of 10 using a book that came with a C64 that my dad got for
free from a garage sale.

Since those first years, the field at every turn has provided me with new
intellectual challenges and as I've progressed I've accumulated different
ideas and projects that I'd like to complete. That includes reasonably fleshed
out ideas in bioinformatics, in distributed operating systems, in models for
runtime type inference for dynamically typed programming languages, virtual
machine construction techniques, and more.

I will never have enough time in my life to fully explore all of these - each
of them will take years of dedicated effort to actually make something out of
- so I have to pick and choose wisely to pursue the projects I care about
given the opportunities presented to me.

My version of "cashing out" is basically sticking my money in a savings
account and getting back to working on interesting things.. or if I have
enough of it, using that money to pay some people to help me explore some of
the more interesting things I have in my mental back pocket.

Some of us actually are passionate about our work. I suppose there are many
that are in the field simply to make some big money and get out and live "the
good life". I consider the life I would live doing that, and it just feels so
soul-crushingly boring and insipid. What a waste of a life.

~~~
pdimitar
While I fully agree with your sentiments for the programming work -- I learned
at 12 and never suffered a loss of enthusiasm, and I am 38 now -- I disagree
on the money part.

You can love your job AND be rich. I've seen programmers achieve it. But to be
brutally honest to all sides, it doesn't come to you by a mere technical
talent. Knowing people, psychology, some sociology and basically having an eye
for opportunity seem to be key.

I am not rich. I've made a ton of bad financial decisions in my life and for a
year now I work really hard to prioritize things properly. I have success on
that front and I am now a pretty wise spender (without being frugal, too) but
I still live paycheck to paycheck.

To go outside that bubble we really have to stop believing in a "secure
income". Many investors and financiers say: "diversify your portfolio". We
must all be working on 4-5 places with 5-10h a week each I guess? Or just be
consultants at several places where the workload for us is low? Have 10 small
SaaS businesses each netting us $500 a month? Not sure yet.

But I definitely do agree that spending the rest of your life only managing
your finances is boring and insipid and is a waste of life indeed.

~~~
kannanvijayan
I was responding particularly to the sentiment of why one would still be
working as they get older, independent of financial situation.

I don't disagree at all that money and financial maturity matters - simply for
assuring the security you need to feed, clothe and shelter yourself through
the inevitable ups and downs of life.. as well as open up opportunities that
you may not have otherwise had access to.

------
alanning
I wonder if part of the issue is a kind of unspoken fear that the “dream”
outcome may not be as common as people want to believe. If I am a young
developer with more stock options than salary I want to believe that I will
have the option of retiring early. Seeing older devs who were not able to
“cash out” plays poorly with that narrative.

~~~
molson8472
Nailed it.

------
ramtatatam
I had a chat with some recruiters recently and they told me there is no future
in the industry for people who are 35+ years old. I'm 33 so I just smiled and
walked away. I later learned the founder of this recruitment company was 26.
Young kids seem to think there is no brains in older people.

On the other hand I always thought the natural progression for the programmer
is to move to higher abstraction level, become lead/coach/consultant... or
start something on their own.

~~~
qaq
If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network. We have a dude pushing 70
he would be able to get a new job the day he would let people know he would
consider switching a job.

~~~
ghaff
>If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network

Every job I've had in computer-related tech since the first one out of school
came from people I knew and had worked with.

------
mark_l_watson
I am 67, but this story occurred when I was young and just out of college:
there was a very old computer programmer at work who had great skill but he
miss-applied it. The worse thing he did was writing tortured FORTRAN code that
self modified itself at runtime - hardware architecture and operating system
dependent binary patches. I promised myself I would never be that guy, read
the book ‘The Egoless Programmer’ and followed a different career path from my
old friend.

~~~
diego_moita
You touched a different but very important issue: in this industry you need to
recycle yourself, you need to stay up to date with new technologies that
overcome the old ones. Being old doesn't necessarily means being obsolete, but
you need to deliberately avoid obsolescence. Sometimes the new shiny things
are actually good.

Some technologies fade and you should avoid fading with them. Assembly
programming has become a niche for people that write compilers. FORTRAN is
giving space to R and Python. Very few people still write COBOL.

------
jondubois
In my 20s, I used to think like that because that's what I was told by
everyone around me. Now I find this idea infuriating.

I'm almost 30 now and I've been working insanely hard since before I left
school and during university; I've been working at least 70 hours per week for
12 years (40 hours on my startup or corporate contracting day job, 30 hours on
a side project). I've had some minor successes but still no big break - I'm
not far from where I left off financially.

One of the many companies I worked for is doing relatively well and I'm
hopeful that my small stake will be worth enough to buy a modest
house/apartment someday but it's still a big gamble at this stage; the shares
could still become worthless... Even if everything goes perfectly well, it's
still not enough for me to retire. I feel that I got very lucky with that one.
I can clearly see how it's possible to get to 50 years old working nonstop
like a freak and making all the right decisions and still not make it
financially.

I've been quite strategic about my career so far. I worked for startups which
had relatively low valuations, proven tech, value-creating areas, fast growth,
good investors, smart founders, were just starting to onboard big clients and
sign big contracts. I also worked for a few hyped SV startups too (I worked
for a SV-based Y Combinator company for over a year).

Even among the 12 or so software companies that I worked at and left, none of
them had successful exits yet or grew sufficiently that it would have allowed
me to make enough money to retire (even if I could pick the best one and
assume that I had been able to negotiate a good equity package). Only one
startup I worked at is doing relatively well and that's also the one which I
stayed at the longest and have the most equity in.

I feel that people who got a big break before they turned 30 missed out on
learning about reality.

~~~
slow_donkey
If you're optimizing for money, early startups would be the last place I'd
look. I'm well aware that I'm making ~60% of a big 4 salary (tc) assuming my
options are useless.

Additionally I doubt I'm learning as much technically than if I were to work
at a big 4and be exposed to much smarter people.

The benefits of startups tend to incur huge tradeoffs.

------
arconis987
I’m so grateful to have worked with older colleagues who did not care about
using the framework du jour. Influenced by their experience, we made some
unorthodox tech choices as a web startup, including the choice to use C++ and
Lisp-like languages heavily, and it worked out beautifully. From them, I
learned that it is more important to ship simple, fast code than to contort
your system to use the latest tech fads when it doesn’t make sense.

~~~
mcguire
It's always entertaining when you do the simplest thing that works, it works,
and then you get to watch someone struggling for months to replace it because
it was too simple and not buzzwordy enough.

~~~
pdimitar
I am not gonna be ashamed to admit that working like your parent commenter
said is a good way to ensure you won't get fired out of the blue as well
(since what you created is not easily upgradeable or replaceable).

But in any case that's a side effect of being competent and is not a specially
crafted tactic -- at least during my career.

And finally, we have to fight hard against the philosophy that all programmers
should be easily replaceable cogs in the big machine. That's an impossible
dream of the businessmen but they still won't give up on it.

------
DanielBMarkham
I took a bunch of time and focused on helping coders instead of coding myself.
I came to coding naturally and never thought of it as much more than
intellectual self-stimulation. It was a lot of fun, and there is some value to
it -- but it tends to get a lot more attention than it should simply because
it feels so good to do it well. Successful startup founders say that coding is
no more than 2-3% of the total effort of providing value to people. I've found
nothing to prove that false; and I've seen a lot of companies and startups.

Recently I'm back to focusing more on coding. I find two things most
interesting:

1\. As I get older, I struggle with attention span and short-term memory more,
but I have greater ability to see deep and widespread cross-cutting patterns.
It's probably an even trade.

2\. I'm not so sure that smart people _should_ be coding. The more I think
about it, the more convinced I become that good coding is _managing cognitive
complexity_. You're always trying to make it work, then make it easy to
understand and maintain. When I think back on all of the multi-billion-dollars
I've seen in project/program disasters, none of it was because the problems
were hard. They were all a combination of poor customer/user participation and
smart folks taking a problem of n complexity and making it into a problem of
n^n complexity. Usually the two were related: tech was constantly used as sort
of a band-aid to fix people problems. It never worked, but it kept a lot of
coders employed for a long time.

Hopefully this wasn't cynical. I love coding and I love making useful things
for people. I have a deep passion for helping developers lead happier and more
productive lives. But I also feel an obligation to be honest about what
happens. It looks a lot different at 50 than it did at 25.

Think about it. Seriously, would you want somebody telling you that you wasted
three years of dev time and could scrap what you have and roll something
useful to production in a month? I've done that several times in my career, at
various ages, and nobody ever liked hearing it. As I got older they liked
hearing it even less. In this business, inexperience, raw intelligence, and
enthusiasm are the things we reward. They come mostly with younger folks.

Tech development is amazing and incredible because _we create our own
realities_. But part of that awesomeness is the fact that left alone, we
create realities that look like ourselves. It is the nature of the work.

~~~
taneq
> 2\. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding.

It depends on their attitude. The smarter the better, IMO, as long as they
understand that the code they're writing _isn 't for them_. They can go hack
on some personal project if they want to flex their "I'm so clever" muscles,
but if they're writing commercial code, that code is for the dumbest of the
dumb who will ever have to maintain it. If someone can focus their intellect
towards making their code clear and simple then great.

Of course, as you say, someone who's competent but has a slightly humbler
intellect will just automatically write simpler code.

------
throwaway98121
Someone correct me, but is the article generalizing some one young CEO to
represent the entire Silicon Valley? If yes, is that accurate?

I’ve come across those types of people in my career. They were cancerous and
didn’t last long. I’ve learned to tune out the noise and cut off people like
that. Fortunately for me, I’ve never had run ins where these people had power
over me. If they did, it’s a shitty company IMO to bring in people like that
and I’m better off elsewhere.

~~~
johnchristopher
That's basically the conclusion of the article.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Average age on my engineering team is about 55. Until recently, the eldest was
still coding at 73.

When I look across the team, the more productive ones are those who keep their
skills and tools up to date. Find a 30 year vet who can code the same routine
in both Go and Python and you'll usually find a productive, dependable
engineer who steers you around many gopher holes.

------
gdubs
Young Michael Jordan could leap high and perform dazzling feats in mid-air.
Old Michael Jordan had tired legs, but could destroy the competition with an
insanely tight post-up game, and a virtually undefeatable fade-away jump shot.

I’ve personally always felt incredibly fortunate to get to work with people
who’ve been in the industry a long time; you can learn a lot from them. And
while you sometimes can get a “step” on them with your youth, they’ll often
school you with the fundamentals.

This is part of the diversity conversation — having a team composed of people
from all walks of life is a competitive advantage. But it takes an enlightened
“coach” to see it.

------
rb808
Is it really common to retire at 35? I'd think it would be just a few could
afford that. Around here property taxes plus health insurance for a family is
$50k/yr. So from 35->65 that is $1.5m. Not including cost of living of course.

Maybe the stock market has been way too successful in the last few decades.
Ask a European or Japanese person about retiring early and living off the
market.

(of course many 35 year olds are struggling to save for a house deposit let
alone thinking about retiring)

~~~
joejerryronnie
No, it is not common - even in the mythical valley. Very few people relative
to the entire industry strike it rich with enough money to travel the world
drinking champagne and eating caviar. The typical valley story goes:

When you're 20 - Live in SF and chase your startup dream of making it big.
Most likely left with a bunch of worthless options and too little pay for the
hours you worked, but great friends and memories (mostly of the after hours
parties).

When you're 30 - Transition to FAANG like company. Live in SF and commute to
the valley. Start making some real money but feel like you sold out. Still
harbor dreams of quitting and launching your startup - right after that next
big vesting period.

When you're 40 - Screw startups, you've got a family to feed, a mortgage to
pay, and college tuition to think about. You've finally made the move from
super-hipster, urban, walkable SF to a random suburb in the valley and may
have even purchased _gasp_ a minivan! Secretly, you find it a much more
pleasurable living experience than SF but won't admit that to anyone.

When you're 50 - Hopefully, through hard work, smart financial decisions, and
a little risk taking, you've gotten your finances under control. You've
figured out how to use debt effectively, have a solid set of investments, and
ideally are working toward multiple streams of income. You can now
legitimately plan your next big career progression, whether that's retirement
(still several years out), scaling back your full time work to focus on
passion projects, or actually launching that startup (with a statistically
much higher probability of success than any 20-something founder).

------
chasing
Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation.
That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em.

Also, wealth is the world's shittiest metric for success. I know a ton of
people with incredible skills who work rather low-paying jobs because they
want to improve the world, follow a particular passion, or whatever.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper
compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em.

Well, there are other reasons. People you hire straight out of college tend to
feel grateful, and also feel like they need to prove themselves (which is
true). So they are usually willing to work extra hard. This can be a good
quality, if nurtured properly with guidance and training.

~~~
chasing
True. I was being a little flip, there. There are also jobs that would be a
waste of time or dreadfully boring for senior devs to spend their time on.

------
cheez
I think the truth is that older, more experienced people do not provide
visible value.

For example, do you think it's undergraduates who come up with the design and
architecture for AWS? No, it's years of pain and lessons that go into it. Then
the elders productize their pain and lessons so that undergrads never need to
learn it.

This is why FAANG want undergrads: their processes keep noobs from making
super stupid mistakes, through the law of large numbers, some survive, feel
some pain, learn and make it to architect level enough to affect the next
iteration of AWS/Google/Azure. At the same time, the company saves on
salaries/benefits/work-life balance.

It won't change because it works. Act accordingly.

------
village-idiot
The "Get rich and get out" expectation is in place because working at the pace
that lots of SV companies demand creates an unacceptably high risk of burnout.
To compensate for this risk many workers and entrepreneurs have setup a mental
and social framework of "I'm only doing this until I can retire young".

Of course, early retirement happens for vanishingly few workers. Some
companies go Google or Uber and let the founders retire, but most do not.

------
z3t4
When I started programming I was very productive, even more then today, but I
was ignorant about performance, data races, xxs, sql injects, lower level
programming, sysadmin, general CS, etc. So I think the problem is managers see
new guys being more productive, but the old "slow" guys gets paid double.

~~~
Ma8ee
Of course it is faster to build a solution with bad performance, is hard to
maintain and a nightmare to test. The manager who doesn’t know the difference
is just a bad manager.

~~~
gronne
I thought that was the definition of a manager?

~~~
Ma8ee
I’ve had good managers.

~~~
gronne
I was mostly joking.

------
avip
<disclaimer: am old? My kids sure think so>

Ageism is real in many verticals. It is healthy to acknowledge that. It’s
equally important to face facts related to age: I am noticeably less
focusable, and my memory is not as good. I slowly become less fluent in
adopting new tech, and it shows (or feels). Most importantly, I have many out
of work responsibilities - parents (not getting younger) and kids (not getting
older in sufficient pace). Consequently, odds of me doing after hours learning
are diminishing. I don’t do open source any more, nor do I have time for cool
side projects. And all that, not the invented stuff in OP, is what makes
ageism a thing.

~~~
gaius
_slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows_

For me, it's the exact opposite. Containers? Oh yeah, they're just like zones
on Solaris. Kubernetes? Works like a VAXcluster. Cloud? Been there, done that,
let's not make the same mistakes. ML? Well we used to call it predictive
statistics, the only real difference now is we run it on GPU not CPU. I pick
up "new" techs easily because I can step back and see the same patterns
repeating.

Experience is the killer app. Ageism is just another prejudice.

~~~
rcarmo
That bit on the VAX is... interesting. It's been a while, and it was a lot
more about hard partitioning, but it makes sense.

~~~
gaius
I see the parallels in the way jobs are scheduled on the cluster rather than
an individual node, storage is common across the cluster, nodes and leave and
join hot, the manageability of it all... all seems very familiar!

------
throw2016
It's pretty silly for commentators here to not recognize their current
thinking rules their future selves out from any respectable employment and
existence in the field because of the prejudice and massive assumptions about
others their current selves hold. 1 or lets say even 10 out of 100 will strike
it lucky, what are the 90 going to do. Retire at 35?

This is exactly like the 'temporarily embarrassed working class' supporting
policies against their interests as they expect to be in exploiter roles
'soon'.

This kind of ideology tries to reframe software engineering not as a
profession like others but some kind track and field with olympic stars
dependent on youth working 100hr weeks to the exclusion of everything else.
What happens to the majority for whom this does not pay off? This is self
importance taken to delusion. This attitude will not only undermine your
experience as you age but also directly reduce the quality of people entering
the field as anyone studying now with options cannot logically choose a field
where you are expected to work like a dog for long odds where experience does
not count.

You reap what you sow.

------
JanneVee
Well even outside of Silicon Valley the question changes to “why aren’t you a
manager yet?”! Annnoying ageist question, despite that my experience is worth
the money. You just need to avoid companies that doesn’t value it correctly.

~~~
mr_custard
My answer to that question is: "I've tried management and whilst I was told
that I was good at it, I didn't enjoy it much - I discovered that I simply
enjoy building and creating things, and that's what I do best".

Nevertheless, I appreciate that it's an irritating question, but I usually put
it down to lack of empathy and/or life experience of the questioner. It would
seem that some people just can't imagine that other people have lives,
thoughts and aspirations that are different to their own.

------
bartread
My team has five middle-aged guys[1] on it, myself included, out of a total of
9. Three of the other four were hired by me. I can only live in hope that next
time I need a job I'll be able to find somewhere that values experience as
much as we do[2].

 _[1] It 's changing slowly but female software engineers are very much in the
minority in Cambridge. I suspect, although cannot prove, that the skew is even
more pronounced amongst those of us in our 40s and beyond._

 _[2] Also, we 're still hiring._

~~~
wildmindwriting
I have noticed the female SWE are in the minority in the Boston/Cambridge
area, too.

At my first company in Boston, I was the first and only female programmer for
a good year and it wasn't for lack of trying to hire more. I don't remember
another female programmer on the web side (there were quite a few on the
hardware side) but most of the team was over 30, with family, and was a good
range of ages.

Now, I manage a team of five developers, only one of which is another woman.
I'm 40 and she is 64. Then again, the youngest person on my team is 35 so we
don't seem to have the problem of ageism in our company, thankfully. When we
were looking for extra help, it was very difficult to even get people in to
interview, let alone someone experienced enough. I'm hoping the job market for
tech continues when I need a job again!

------
xivzgrev
If accumulating money is important to you there’s basically two ways to match
this manager’s expectation: 1) work at Facebook/google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc
for X years, keep your spending low, and invest the rest wisely 2) work at
startup X for 5-10 years and cash out in IPO

A manager can easily see on your resume if number 1 applies. In which case we
look at number 2. The odds are good that no matter your badassery, you WON’T
hit the jackpot, because a company’s IPO likelihood is dependent on far more
things than your contribution.

What you see is some circuitous logic - “a talented person has made enough to
retire”. But how do you define talented? By the fact they are of a certain age
and have made enough to retire.

------
mcguire
I dunno.

Maybe it's because I was just sitting here reading Ian Stewart's chapter on
Sally Clark and pondering probability, but I rather suspect that the
probability that you're over 50 and suck is much higher than the probability
that you are over 50 and are a badass.

Mostly because the probability that you suck is incredibly high.

And I'm saying this as someone who is over 50, with a phd, a bunch of
programming languages and blog posts, and crap on GitHub. And I know I suck.
Hell, the primary advantage I have over most of the people I've worked with is
that I know what a badass looks like in the wild.

I think I'm going to get some more coffee now.

~~~
zrobotics
I would agree with you that likely the majority of people over 50 do 'suck'.

But... so do the majority of people under 50. Somehow, things still get built
and projects get finished. Fetishizing the rare genius doesn't help anyone,
since by definition they are a rarity. How, exactly, does age make for worse
employees? Since this discussion is about ageism specifically, and not that
90% of everything is crap.

------
austincheney
All I can say is thank god I don’t work in the valley.

Some people actually enjoy programming and don’t have equity. Not everybody
who programs is a high school drop out entering the ground floor some trendy
ad-based social start up. Some of us actually solve real problems.

EDIT:

If I had to guess at the quote the article author was looking for I would
guess it is this: [https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-
sma...](https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smarter/)

------
gizmodo59
Ageism is a real factor in tech companies but as the demand grows and tech
companies have been around for decades this might go down a bit. May be not
for startups but FAANGs definitely will have more aged developers. It’s also
important to realize the other factors play in this. Where you are born, your
race matters a lot more than many people think. Two people of same age and
equal talent but different race aren’t treated the same way in almost any
country in the world (Not trying to generalize but it is prevalent)

------
strken
In my past two jobs, I've found that the software engineers who want to still
be software engineers in a decade are in the minority - maybe a third of the
workforce. If you spent your early career wanting to become a manager ASAP,
then maybe it's easy to slip up and think of older software engineers as
people who failed to make that transition, rather than dedicated individuals.

------
opportune
I think I must be one of the younger people on this site because while I agree
ageism is a bad thing in the sense that age should simply not be a factor when
it comes to hiring/pay, and that experience is good, I also have direct
experience working with older developers who didn’t know the new tools we were
trying to use (in my case, AI and big data) very well and so weren’t any more
productive / were less productive than younger people who were more
experienced within that subject area.

That being said, by far the best engineers I’ve met were the people who
usually pioneered these systems 20 years ago and were now domain experts. But
what I mean by this post is that I also have met a bunch of people who
basically only know basic crud, and just because they had a lot of experience
in that area didn’t mean that transferred very well to other areas.

There’s a limit to how much your knowledge of SQL and Windows server from a
decade ago will help you with Kafka and Cassandra

~~~
zrobotics
But that has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with poor skills-
fit. Because someone fresh out of a CS program won't be all that much better.
You admitted that there are cases where experience helps, but some team
members don't have that experience.

Isolate for variables, don't compare apples to oranges. You are comparing
older engineers without relevant experience to "younger people who were more
experienced within that subject area." What about younger engineers who aren't
experienced? I suspect their performance will be equally poor, if not worse.

------
S_A_P
A few questions about this article. 1) is this hyperbole or is it a
generalization that seems to follow the 80/20 rule? 2) I can’t imagine that
there are enough jobs in SV that could consistently churn out millionaires-
right? I would think that maybe some fraction of 1% of the people there hit
the start up lotto. 3) I’m guessing this article mentioned here was scrubbed
from the internet, but I would be curious to read it. 4) I enjoy working most
of the time. Sure there are crappy days but I don’t think I would live a
healthy lifestyle were I to be well enough off to not work at age 50. 5) if SV
is really generally like this, why would someone want to be there? Is it just
to get a shot at launching the next billion dollar company?

------
w_t_payne
There are any number of talent pools that are overlooked because of widespread
discrimination.

To win, you need to behave in a more rational way than the competition, which
means discarding irrational biases and looking for help in places that others
undervalue and disregard.

------
freyir
It’s a bit scary to hear these stories, especially as I squandered 20s getting
a PhD, and most of my 30s living paycheck-to-paycheck at a non-FAANG R&D lab
that pays peanuts. I’d love to move to a better-paying company, but it feels
almost hopeless when I walk into a SV tech office and I’m the oldest-looking
person there in my 30s.

That said, I’ve been interviewing developers over the last few months, and
it’s _hard_ to find good older developers on the SV job market (especially at
a non-FAANG R&D lab that pays peanuts). We mostly get new college grads who
are completely inept. I’d like to think the good older devs are gainfully
employed _somewhere_.

------
raptordamus
I saw people quoting Charlie Munger. Munger has done extensive study on the
topic of incentives. If you want to know why Silicon Valley is so
discriminating towards experienced people you should ask what their incentives
are.

Startups are incentivized to hire the cheapest, youngest, most naive engineers
possible, work them as hard as possible then flip them. If you are old you are
no longer cheap or naive. If you aren’t naive, you are unlikely to work 80
hours a week. You can no longer be flipped.

Silicon Valley startups want Ivy League type executives. Why? Because the
investors trust them more. Humans give money to people who resemble
themselves. Ivy League VC give money to Ivy League executives.

Joining a startup has a very low probability of making you rich. In fact, they
are specifically designed not to make you rich as an engineer.

To make matters worse, you have to spend 3-5 years of life you will never get
back trying to get the lottery payout.

You getting rich as a non founder at a startup means the executives and
venture capitalists miscalculated something. Why would they pay you a cent
more than they need to? There are plenty of people in the valley who will now
work for just their base salary and nothing more. Why should they give you a
single dime more than this?

If you are a typical high functioning aspergers engineer, you are better off
using your skills to become a quant or a trader in the finance industry. Teach
yourself.

The tools have advanced to a point where anyone can access huge amounts of
leverage.

I was an engineer for a long time and I realized that all sides of this is a
losing game. All I want is to be left alone and financially independent.

Big companies are just as bad, except they don’t pretend there is a chance you
will get rich.

~~~
pdimitar
Pardon the esoteric language, but I feel almost as if this was written by my
future self.

> _I was an engineer for a long time and I realized that all sides of this is
> a losing game. All I want is to be left alone and financially independent._

^ This pierced my heart very painfully. Describes my current mindset
perfectly.

I realized the full extent of how screwed we the engineers are in the job
market just a year or so ago. We can bring millions in value but are paid much
less than people who basically only bark orders (good managers do much more...
but are so incredibly rare).

The whole economy of today's world seems to be in favor of certain traits and
most of them are luck or incidental -- race, family, area of birth, and most
of all: network/friends! I've known people dumb as bricks who couldn't solve a
problem if the solution was biting them on the nose yet they knew a few
influential people and right now are making ~$90k a month for wearing suits
and showing up to meaningless meetings 4 times a month.

\---

It's not easy starting to come to grips with the extremely rigged nature of
the world's economy and NOT be bitter or self-loathing. Not hating myself for
being stupid before and not looking objectively at the world is taking 99% of
my free energy but I'll keep fighting that battle until I forgive myself and
start looking forward to the future. Meditation and exercise do help.

Sorry for the personal aside. Your message resonated with me. I am currently
38 years old and just finished an extremely tough and terrible period during
which I couldn't get a job even though I aced most interviews up until the
last phase when the mythical "poor cultural fit" door got slammed in my face.
This happened about 20 times over 6 months.

Now, even though I found the perfect company and team whom I very much like, I
am left with a ton of existential questions which I don't have the answer to.

What advice could you give me?

(I'll look into the quantative analyst in more depth for sure.)

------
world32
After a certain amount of time (my guess is around 5 years experience)
software engineers tend to experience diminishing levels of returns when it
comes to productivity over years of experience. The difference between an SWE
with 5 years experience and one with 1 year experience is massive, but the
difference between somebody with 5 years experience and 10 years experience is
much less so.

I'm talking about standard software engineering roles - CRUD based
applications and so on. The story is different for more specialised roles that
involve expert knowledge i.e. machine learning, data science, computer
graphics, info security etc.

If I see the CV of somebody who has been doing the same kind of software
engineering jobs for 20 years my thought is that this is somebody with no real
interest in it and just does it as a 9-5 job. Now personally I don't see
anything wrong with that. However, the problem is the difference between an
"enthusiast" and a "9-5er" is much less apparent when they are young, their
CVs will likely be very similar if they both have 3-5 years experience,
however after 20 years it will become clear who is "passionate" about their
craft and who just wants to go home to their family at the end of the day.
Again I have nothing against people like that and I'm sorry for using the word
passionate like that but I think that this is one of the root causes of this
issue..

------
Dowwie
If I go to a doctor who misdiagnoses an issue I have, I don't generalize that
all doctors are incompetent. That doctor, in my particular case, misdiagnosed
my issue.

------
Terretta
On a contrarian note:

Below a certain age, tooling and practices knowledge is likely to be up-to-
date. First thing they learned was today’s ways.

Above a certain age, it takes additional expertise to assess whether the
individual kept learning every year or just kept relying on the first thing
they learned.

Recruiters and contentless managers often fail to tell the difference, so mis-
bias on age which doesn’t cause but can correlate to out-of-date skills.

At both ages, young and old, assess for self-learning, not age.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _Below a certain age, tooling and practices knowledge is likely to be up-to-
> date._

There are exceptions. C++ game devs for instance often shun the STL for good
reasons (compilation times, performance of debug build…), and then the junior
fresh from college must unlearn most of what they believed about "modern" C++.
They're up to date on the standard all right, they're just not up to date on
the best _practices_ of the field they're getting into.

~~~
zrobotics
Slightly OT, but hasn't this changed in recent years? I'm not in the industry,
but I'd heard that things like EA_STL had gone out of fashion in favor of just
using STL. If this is the case, are there any resources for what to be wary of
in the STL?

------
EliRivers
On the general theme, as I type I have a gap in my team that on paper is for a
more junior, inexperienced developer; I have deliberately not starting looking
for someone to fill that post, and told HR to consider it simply frozen for
the moment, because right now I simply don't have the spare capacity within
the team to take on an inexperienced developer. Another vacancy, for a more
experienced developer, I _am_ hiring for.

------
jacquesm
If you're doing the same thing for 30+ years you probably are doing something
wrong anyway unless it happens to be the thing that you enjoy doing most.

~~~
pdimitar
Brain craves diversity. That's a fact. I love programming a lot even at 38 but
lately I really feel the need to immerse myself into something else for a
while -- and I am pretty sure I'll come back to programming even stronger and
smarter. I just need to get programming out of my head for a few months.

...But living paycheck to paycheck robs us of the opportunity to give in to
this very human need (diversification of our experiences). This has become one
of the reasons I started to feel old and tired (while still being only 38) and
lately I'm putting a lot of conscious effort to be financially wise so I can
buy myself a few years of break eventually. That, or I'll improve my self-
confidence and work as a consultant and a founder. Time will tell.

Did you have such a period in your life? If so, how did you handle it?

~~~
jacquesm
> Did you have such a period in your life?

Yes, quite a few in fact. It has led me to the point where I purposefully
shake things up every couple of years to avoid getting stuck in a rut. It took
me a decade or two to realize this was causing me problems, but once it became
deliberate it actually helped to provide structure. Easily bored is a complete
understatement.

> If so, how did you handle it?

I try to do something radically different every couple of years now. The last
company I started has upset my careful plans though, it took more than a
decade to take off.

------
bborud
If you have a young CEO with very little prior work experience, why would you
expect them to understand how to recruit, hire and manage people who are
different from them? We tend to prefer people we can understand and relate to
and if you are a 20-something who hasn't had a professional career yet, people
older than you may be a bit of a mystery. As will being a CEO or a manager.

------
rcarmo
I keep getting recruiter spam every week, and I've made it a point to be
polite--I may take some time, but I do reply to every message that isn't an
automated shotgun mail, because even though I am sometimes exceedingly annoyed
at the airheadedness and calousness of some recruiters, there are often
valuable insights to be had as to one's value in the marketplace, and one out
of ten interchanges usually leads to meeting interesting people.

Now, I'm in Europe, and around half the recruiters who figure out my age break
off contact or ghost me immediately (at least until the next opportunity comes
around--I had one major tech company ping me repeatedly in 2017 and break off
every time...).

------
a3n
> If you want a healthy team, you're going to need a mix of people. Cutting
> off entire segments of the population from your company's ranks just because
> you don't understand their value only hurts yourself.

That could be a direct quote from Peopleware.

------
drharby
The article referenced on this one, regarding company culture, is spot on for
my current role and company.

But the author's observation of 'make hay while the sun is out ' is spot on.

Shame on company middle managers perpetuating this mindset, but i cant help
think such discriminatiom is a cost optimization habit. How are recruitors
punished for categorically dismissing a demographic?

I understand how the company is hurt, but how is the recruitor, the
gatekeeper, incentivized to NOT be dismissive?

------
intralizee
I think people prefer this mentality when the economy isn't doing so hot. Same
goes for people who think they're being treated unfairly by age. The health of
the economy is the deciding factor and depending on the health of the
particular industry as well. Older developers I've encountered have always
been super. Unless they have some ego that tries to claim superiority by "age"
equating to more experience; which is never the case.

------
pauljurczak
I am yet another, visibly old (57), former paper (one) millionaire. I like
sailing, climbing, biking, skiing, snowboarding, etc., but I have zero
interest in retiring and pursuing any of these activities full time. It would
become too boring. I'm self employed and work on cutting edge R&D projects I'm
passionate about. I really don't care what someone's definition of success and
its timetable is, neither should you.

------
geebee
Good blog post, nice write up of the conversation, but she left out the part
at the end where the CEO bemoans the shortage of qualified software engineers.

------
yegle
Pretty sure the CEO mentioned at the beginning of the article was referring to
Mark Zuckerberg's "young people are just smarter" comment.

------
codinger
I think this line of thinking is fallacious on the premise that the industry
is growing at such a fast rate the next generation of engineers and developers
is exponentially larger than the previous creating this illusion that most of
the older folks must have retired by their 30s or 40s.

------
api
I would walk out at "why are you still working?" That is so many layers of
ass9.

------
RickJWagner
As a programmer in my 50s, I offer younger HN participants this idea: You will
get old (if you are lucky). This will be of concern to us all at some point. I
know of _nobody_ who quit early and lived happily ever after.

------
Animats
Discrimination _does_ pay. That's why it's so widespread.

------
matte_black
Soon I’ll be on the wrong side of 30 and part of the reason I strive to master
important skills is because I know I’ll be put out to pasture some day if I
can’t demonstrate my value. I don’t want to depend on a post-ageist society to
save me.

------
gms
Article commits a classic fallacy: one bad example leading to a general
statement because the latter makes a better headline.

Rather like going from ‘my friend’s house got robbed’ to ‘all houses get
robbed’.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Because the author related 2 anecdotes din't mean they're the only ones they
witnessed. They may have seen a pattern over time.

~~~
neeleshs
... which should be mentioned with numbers. Otherwise go by what's in the
article - 2 anecdotes. My anecdote is that I'm > 40 but highly saught after
engineer,by several CEOs far younger than me. But I know it does not mean
that's the general pattern.

Edit: everything in the article was a good read, except the generalization in
its title

------
pojzon
Works pretty well for Google tho. Too bad most companies dont understand that
they are not Google! and never will be - most often - dont even have to be.

Unfortunately most managers are sheeps, only able to copy ideas of other ppl
without thought if its even needed/required.

Im in this industry for a few years and already see that all middle level
managers should be fired. Software Craftsmen would be a lot better to lead
projects.

~~~
xb10y
How does it work for Google? Except for the "search+ads" division, which seems
too important to ruin, Google gives the impression of a highly unfocused
company with internal feuds and fiefdoms that releases one half-baked product
after the next.

It seems to me that Google only hires to keep people from working for the
competition.

~~~
dannypgh
I think you might be greatly underestimating the fraction of the company that
works on search or ads if you think you can make a meaningful comment about
the company that starts with "Except for the 'search+ads' division."

