
Show HN: NoAgeismInTech Job Board (Update) – Companies' Culture - carmenbr
https://noageismintech.com/blend
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rl3
Ageism has always baffled me. In my pre-funding pursuits, I've always dreamed
of hiring a team composed of top-tier talent. That typically means people who
have been in their respective industry 20+ years. I'm in my early thirties and
there's no one on my hire list that's younger than me. That isn't to say I
wouldn't hire anyone younger than myself provided they've the skill—I
absolutely would—it's just that age and experience (and thus skill) tend to be
highly correlated.

Presumably the motivation for the most common form of ageism is that young
people are easier to exploit and abuse under the pretext of "saving money",
but why the fuck would anyone ever want to run their company on that basis? It
makes very little sense.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> young people are easier to exploit and abuse under the pretext of "saving
> money", but why the fuck would anyone ever want to run their company on that
> basis?

There are two ways to get more from your developer team: quality and quantity.

Quality means you pay your people more and more as you grow. Grow from 10 to
20 over 10 years, while retaining most people and tripling their salaries.

For that to work:

\- your revenue per employee must grow substantially

\- you need managers who are flexible, because you have to adapt your
workplace to your employees needs rather than just hiring new people when they
turn over

Those are difficult things that not every owner can bring about in their
company.

The other approach is quantity: grow your dev team from 10 to 100 to 1000. For
that to work you need:

\- Employees who can follow instruction without worrying too much about
whether the tasks make sense

\- Employees who just want a standard job and don’t need much customization
over their career

\- Efficient hiring processes, centered on a repeatable, consistent employee
profile (not necessarily the most capable profiles)

\- Caps on wages

The quantity strategy doesn’t require finesse. In fact it works better without
it. You make coarse, aggregate decisions and let people turn over as needed.
The turnover “cleans” the talent pool of people with special needs, which is
crucial for the system to work.

The quality strategy requires really smart management which is very hard to
hire.

~~~
woah
Tripling the salaries based just on seniority seems insane. Either you started
way too low, or you're going to end up paying a lot. The developers that you
were able to recruit with your low starting salary are going to end up working
alongside people who came for the high salaries and may very well be quite a
bit more talented. This will create a lot of friction.

And at the beginning, either you are keeping your plans of an eventual 3x
salary secret from employees, in which case it can not motivate them, you are
promising it to them which as an employee I would view with great suspicion,
or you are writing some kind of agreement about it which seems like it has all
kinds of problems.

Giving employees equity is a much better version of what you are trying to do
and I'm puzzled as to why you didn't suggest it.

\- Employees get it when it's cheap and it literally represents the value of
the company that you were hoping to give them in the form of higher salaries

\- It's not based on some kind of vague aspiration to be a good boss, it's a
solid, well understood form of compensation

\- No new employee is going to resent a lower-skilled old timer for their
equity- they earned it.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> Tripling the salaries based just on seniority seems insane.

That’s a little antagonistic. Your whole comment is weirdly antagonistic.

> Either you started way too low, or you're going to end up paying a lot.

Or 1) you start by paying what people are worth according to “market rates”,
2) at some point they break even on what they cost, 3) every year they bring
in more revenue than the last and you share it with them.

> The developers that you were able to recruit with your low starting salary
> are going to end up working alongside people who came for the high salaries
> and may very well be quite a bit more talented.

Sure, but they’re paid on performance not “talent”. Work is not a talent show.
The people getting more money have successfully deployed projects worth much
more than their salary. That’s why their salaries were bumped. If this new
person can do that they’ll earn the same salary.

> And at the beginning, either you are keeping your plans of an eventual 3x
> salary secret from employees, in which case it can not motivate them, you
> are promising it to them which as an employee I would view with great
> suspicion, or you are writing some kind of agreement about it which seems
> like it has all kinds of problems.

Seems simple enough to me. You do the math on how much revenue you think your
work has brought in. I do my own math, and we negotiate a number every few
years.

> Employees get [equity] when it's cheap and it literally represents the value
> of the company that you were hoping to give them in the form of higher
> salaries

Revenue-aligned compensation is very different from an ownership share, both
materially and in terms of what they represent.

> It's not based on some kind of vague aspiration to be a good boss

Paying people according to their contribution to the business model is neither
vague nor aspirational, although it does require you to have a business model
that includes your workers.

And equity calculations in my experience are pretty vague and aspirational.
Not sure what you’re indicating at here.

> No new employee is going to resent a lower-skilled old timer for their
> equity- they earned it.

I’m not sure if what you’re describing is based on my actual advice or a
misunderstanding so I’ll let you chime in if you think there’s still a
resentment issue here.

~~~
woah
I wasn't trying to be weirdly antagonistic.

Your original comment sounded like you were trying to reconcile the common HN
views of "developers don't get paid enough", "big corporations are soul-
crushing", and "startup equity is a scam". At the time I didn't see how it
came together as a cohesive whole.

You've add some detail here about this business model, which involves giving
developers commission directly correlated to the performance of projects they
work on. This gives me more of an idea of what you're talking about.
Commission tends to work really well when you can easily quantify someone's
contribution, for example sales.

I suppose this might work alright for developers in a consultancy, although it
would be hard to separate the developer's work from the work of whoever landed
the sale. A developer could do a terrible job on a project, giving the firm a
bad reputation down the line (although their manager might not be aware of
this at the time of completion). If the project was big and lucrative, they
would get paid a lot. On the other hand, a developer could do a great job on a
small project, that led to a much bigger contract which that developer was not
able to work on for some reason. They would miss out on the benefits of their
good job.

For a product company, it sounds even harder. How do you compensate the people
making internal tooling for example? How do you compensate devops people?
What's the split between the developer who programmed a feature and developer
who runs it in production? My suspicion is that for a product company this
compensation scheme would start to look really similar to the normal practice
of using market rates and negotiating for raises, since attribution of revenue
would be really unclear.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> How do you compensate the people making internal tooling for example?

You need to place them in your business model.

What are the tools used for? What would happen if the tooling didn’t get built
and your colleagues used off the shelf tools?

That will tell you how much your team is worth.

Most people seem to throw up their hands at this point and say “it’s hard, and
imperfect” and they stop working on the business model.

But any model is imperfect. Even the sales person you mentioned, who earns a
flat commission on sales... they could be costing the company more than
they’re bringing in, if their sales are forcing developers into crunch, or if
their customers churn, etc. The point of the model is not to mirror reality
perfectly, it’s to give you numbers that can guide your negotiations, as I
said.

Just because it’s unusual to think about how developers fit into your business
model doesn’t mean it’s impossible or it shouldn’t be done.

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stevesearer
I've always thought it would be a good idea for companies to note the typical
type of office environment (private, semi-private, open office) employees can
expect for the specific role.

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NonEUCitizen
Your link goes to a specific company's post:

[https://noageismintech.com/blend](https://noageismintech.com/blend)

rather than the front page:

[https://noageismintech.com/](https://noageismintech.com/)

~~~
carmenbr
Yes. I don’t know how to announce an update as I already have launched the
website here and if I link to the front page, there will be no new post

~~~
dpau
can you append a random querystring to the url or something? i'm on mobile
where the full url isn't immediately visible in the browser, and i found the
link quite confusing, as i assumed i was already on the front page.

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carmenbr
Hi all, we have updated the website, adding what matters in companies' culture
from experienced professionals point-of-view. Some of them also have age
chart, as Monzo and Bulb

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onida
No age is min tech.

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ageoldlie
I don't interview anyone over 40. Period. Reason is very simple. By that time
they're bitter from some past work experiences and have figured out now a
bunch of ways to look busy at work. They also likely have more demands coming
from family if they were brave enough to try marriage in the "gig economy" we
all live in now. It's great that there is a service out there for those who
were never able to save enough to retire before they got replaced with younger
more energetic and cheaper labor. At 52, I feel lucky every day that I now
have a job in management. Not nearly as interesting work as what I did
technically ten years ago, but I'm also making almost three times as much
money, and who knows how much more than than one of my former colleagues who
is in his 70's with a PhD from a top 10 university and is working at Starbucks
to help pay his daughter's $45,000/yr. tuition!

~~~
sh87
I've seen bitter, demanding and unpleasant 20, 30 and 40 somethings. Also some
of the most brilliant minds I've met are grey haired. Age does not matter.

I hope you meet someone compelling enough to trigger you to rethink your bias.
Good luck.

~~~
ageoldlie
Could not agree more. Experience is hugely valuable. Unfortunately, the way a
lot of smaller less-funded companies like ours work is that we take the
"brilliant ideas" from someone else (often university research but also
sometimes insights gleaned through in-house interview process) and implement
them for our customers. The vast bulk of our contribution is what you might
call "scut work" (often the kind of thing that gets farmed out to grad
students and post-docs on the academia side when they want to build a working
prototype) and faster rather than smarter is what enables us to compete most
effectively with the rest of our market. I wish it weren't this way. I'd still
like to be doing technical work myself, in a more carefree and supportive
environment, with all the protections that union members in other trades (like
law enforcement and primary education) appear to enjoy. But it seems that the
technology sector the world over is moving more and more in the direction of
"at will" employment where everyone (except when it comes to affirmative
action for certain protected classes) has to fight for their own survival
until they get too old to put up much of a fight anymore. "Capitalism is
cannibalism" is what one of my first supervisors told me right before I got
laid off in 2002, and from where I sit today, I feel like truer words could
not have been spoken.

