As a generalist developer nearing 40, I worry about this all the time. I have extensive and valuable experience in certain areas, including management, but I have started investigating other directions I can take my career and more focused specialities I can pursue to extend my shelf life, because it's seems pretty clear that it's not really viable to continue my current path.
I just don't understand the bias. I'm too young to have experienced age discrimination like this yet, but its obvious at least to me that the best developers and hell, leaders, that I've worked with were all a part of older generations. Is it a shortcoming in pay for all these people? I feel like being out of work for 3 years would definitely lower whatever standard of pay I had prior to becoming unemployed. I just do not get the disconnect
Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.
The only name in this thread I recognise (although, to be fair, most people aren't using their real names), and as an aside, a name that a seventy-something year-old Vietnam veteran running an apartment full of automated test machines in Greater Tokyo was surprised I dropped when he told me that the Digital Mars compiler was testing well. That compiler was always well behaved. I wonder if his age would have been an impediment to finding work at in the US; in Tokyo he suffered only the problem of being a foreigner.
other HN threads have debated heavily about why the startup industry is centered in SV, given its ultra high cost of living and labor. and yet, despite everything, SV remains at the center.
and that's why i think your explanation is closer to the truth. higher salaries for older workers wouldn't matter. what does matter is that management thinks older workers will bring the wrong sauce to the product, exhibit reasonable skepticism of the (probably unsuccessful) product concept, generally fail to buy in to the vision and sass their 24 year old masters.
Money can easily move. Money chooses to be there due to wanting to be there, good weather, terrain, politics, etc. There is some due to historical effects, but more people than not consider CA coast weather to be pretty ideal, hence the higher cost of living.
Why move if you can entice people to move into your back yard with all that money and not have to go anywhere?
And, weather doesn’t adequately explain the high CoL anywhere outside California or Hawaii. “It’s where the jobs are, so everyone wants to be there does,” and it also explains California. (Hawaii is special— it’s an archipelago, so, cost of shipping goods plus weather is really the best explanation, given the lack of a compelling employment story.)
Because there is more money in SV. All else equal financially, as it was in 1960s, CA is better. Now all else is not equal, except that cost of living may have finally caught up so residents are paying what the weather is worth.
And why is there more money? Because more people want to live there than other places. Why is that? That’s where the jobs are. You’re not rebutting my argument at all.
The jobs were in other places too, but generally people with money move away from less desirable to more desirable places. How many people desire to move to a place is shown by the prices people are willing to pay.
If that's really the case then "age discrimination" doesn't necessarily indicate deliberately avoiding older workers to the sake of the fact that they're old. Say you have to fill a software developer role and the highest TC you can offer is $100k. Not unheard of for a company, say, one standard deviation below average. You interview a bunch of 40 year olds and 50 year olds and all of them have existing salaries way above that. What is the recruiter supposed to do, keep interviewing people that they almost certainly won't accept the offer? Ostensibly that' the law, but in reality anyone in that situation is going to shift their attention to people that would be willing to work for that kind of compensation.
This is partly what it's probably best to publish salary ranges as part of the job description, at least for companies other than top companies. The above scenario does mean that the minority of older devs that would accept that salary range get filtered out, and that's suboptimal.
Older workers = more experience = more responsibility = higher pay.
Without that extra responsibility there's no reason to pay someone more simply because they're older. The pay should be based on what the job is, not the age or 'experience' of the person doing it.
If you've ever sat in a hiring meeting, you'd know it's straightforward discrimination, but it's positive discrimination in favor of young people . It goes like this:
"Old guy here is a low/mid level person after 20 years, so he clearly isn't a superstar. Young guy here is low/mid level person, so he has potential to be a superstar."
Hiring committees, smothered by the legal ass covering around race and sex discrimination, never even think twice about making this discriminatory argument. It's even officially enshrined in hiring plans as "expectation of trajectory", a rule that only applies to old people.
And before you say "ok but that's a logical argument", it's exactly the same logically correct argument as the (illegal) "bases on my limited knowledge, a white/Chinese/male candidate I just met is more likely to be successful at this job than a black/Hispanic/female candidate".
The reasons age discrimination happen are fairly complex (and I'm not ready to write all the ones I understand out), but to your point about the best in the field being part of the older generation, it is my anecdotal experience that top performers don't seem to have problems with employment as long as they can work (generally). My own mother was exceptional in her field, thought not so much as to be written about, and continued to get job offers out of the blue years after illness had robbed her of the ability to work or even speak, purely off reputation. Her friends and colleagues that I've spoken to have had similar experiences as they've retired having lead similarly successful careers.
Of course, by definition, most people aren't exceptional or even in the top 10% and our society unfairly (and unwisely) punishes them for getting older.
Rich get richer.
Top performers get more/better offers.
Poor get poorer.
Non-top performers get less/worse offers.
I remember reading something where Paul Graham of Ycombinator said top performers never apply for jobs. They are often referred and handed jobs. And on the other side, you have ton of (supposedly) not so great workers who are sending out job applications by the dozens trying to get a job.
I'm not familiar with the PG essay you mention, but there's one by Joel Spolsky that says something similar to what you describe, that great developers rarely apply for jobs[0], that I've found to generally be true. If you do great work, and are great to work with, former coworkers will jump at the chance to work with you again and recommend you to their own colleagues.
>Whenever I hear "We need more programmers! Make more young people interested in programming! Teach programming at kindergarten!" I always get the urge to ask "What did you do with the old ones you had?"
>Where are all those programmers you hired 5-20 years ago? Why is no programmer at your company older than 40? Why do you have senior software engineers that are 25 years old? What did you do to all those people?
>If you can't take care of your employees, no wonder you never have enough.
older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no matter whether they liked coding or management more. the ones that failed in some way - meaning a disruption in their spending and earning capability - are the only ones on the market trying to get programming jobs, and complaining about it.
fixing the earning trajectory in a programming track helps fix this outcome too. FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.
> older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory ... FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.
The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. At a certain point, a lot of engineers plateau in terms of technical ability and are unable to continue to level up. For many, they feel compelled to switch tracks to management to continue to make progress, regardless of whether they have any innate ability or desire to excel at management.
>...they feel compelled to switch tracks to management to continue to make progress, regardless of whether they have any innate ability or desire to excel at management.
Can confirm: Once you "plateau" in a division, the only options are lateralling to a technology you don't know (with the same expectations exacted upon you) or simply going management and that assumes that there's room in management.
Given how frequently "organisational shifts/changes" occur, that could leave you out in the cold, just as well.
or they fall for the money-making scam, where their new car payment is now the same amount as their rent originally was when they began their careers. Buying larger houses, etc. Basically always barely acclimating to their new level of wealth, so that they always try to climb up the next rung.
I recently quit a job that was advertised as a developer but turned into 90% paperwork. Lasted over a year (it was contractor anyway). But in hindsight, basically NO amount of money would make me happy or willing to fill out forms all day. Seriously, even another $100k wouldn't make me feel any better, I'd still be miserable and not doing what I love.
My company does explicitly say that certain levels, roughly equivalent to a staff engineer at most companies, will likely be a career level (as in, you will never advance beyond it) for many people that level still pays very well - easily in the 200-300 TC range maybe more. As long as companies are okay with developers being at this level for a long time - perhaps even decades - I'm fine with it. The only thing that would bother me is an "up or out" kind of culture, that prioritizes "velocity". Fortunately I think more and more companies are getting comfortable with developers that they no will never progress beyond a senior developer role.
yes, money. life changes that required more money to maintain their current or desired standard of living. expectation of life changes that required more money to maintain their current or desired standard of living. expectation of generational wealth if their inheritance or lack thereof doesn't already accomplish that for them.
did I really need to spell that out? I know some people can't relate, but its not clear to me how much they can't relate
If you live anywhere besides the west coast in a major city and have 7-10 years of experience you can easily make $130K as a senior developer. That puts you right at the 5th quintile of household income.
If your spouse is making even $50K that puts you in the top decile.
My commute is 30-40 minutes a day on the three days a week I actually have to go into the office. Any job I work I make sure the “core hours” allow me to go into work after traffic dies down and leave before traffic picks up.
How do you think the other 80% of households survive that aren’t making the $130K that an average developer can make in any large city or if you’re a dual income earner with your spouse making about the average of a college educated worker of $50K - how do you think the other 90% of households make it?
But then again, I am also of the opinion that the school you go to doesn’t have as much bearing on your later success in life - as long as it safe and teaching the basics - your home environment.
I look at the top 20 students who went to my (relatively poor performing school) and we were all teacher’s kids or doctor’s kids. There are two doctors, a few teachers, one professor at an Ivey league school, and a lawyer or two.
But my current job is also in the northern burbs where I live.
Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech.
So hack on the cool stuff at home. Treat your job as a job. There's no principal broken by going into management.
Like I said in another post, I just bought a 5 bedroom/3-1/2 bath house, 3000+ square foot house with a large office for $330K two years ago in the northern burbs of Atlanta where the school systems are ranked in the top 15% nationwide. It is the most affluent county in GA and one of the fastest growing in the nation. Three exits down the same size house is going for about $450K and you’re in one of the 10 most affluent cities in the nation -Johns Creek GA. (http://money.com/money/collection-post/4504851/richest-towns...)
Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech.
When I’m at home, I’m exercising, spending time with my wife and son, and just relaxing. If I can’t keep up with the latest tech at work, it’s time to change jobs.
Yes I will do work related side projects to learn a new to me technology, or proof of concepts with newer technology that aren’t on the critical path. I also work at small companies where I do get my hands dirty with everything from the front end to playing around with whatever I want to with a DEV AWS Account.
I don’t do “leading edge technology”. They are probably not widely marketable yet. I stay on the far end of “the slope of enlightenment” going to “Plateau of Productivity” of the Hype Cycle.
I wonder how much the transition to management helps nowadays. I have a few friends who did that, lost a lot of technical relevance and have had a terrible time finding new jobs as many places promote from within.
I've been consulting the last few months, mostly brought in to coach CTO's. I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers.
This leads to mismanagement, and nobody likes being mismanaged, (also it usually means you're being underpaid), so devs eventually wise up and get out. If you think about it, this is a natural extension of the "the best code is no code" ethos.
The best situations I've seen are programmers-managing-programmers. I've been lucky in my career to work for multiple "engineer-turned-founder" types, and these have felt the most "aligned."
I suspect that MBA programs should start including a CS component.
Sounds about right. A non-technical manager managing technical people is like the commander of a tank battalion not knowing how fast his tanks can go or what kind of ammunition they shoot, their fuel range, hell he probably doesn't even know how many people can fit in a single tank. But he thinks he's fit to manage such a unit because he's an expert in "general warfare", and he has all the "metrics".
I've seen it in my own employment multiple times, my team's(admittedly good-hearted) managers come in and say "We'd like to do (list of 10 things). Now we know the software has limitations, and we don't have any money for feature enhancement, so feel free to tell us no on any of these."
Us: "We can do 2 of those, maybe three if you can give us a couple of days to hack in one of the simpler requests"
Managers: confused, questioning but begrudgingly accepting looks
> I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers.
That's because they don't. I've had good managers and bad ones, and all the good ones were, or had been, software engineers themselves. (Of course, some of the engineers were not so great as managers.) As I like to say, software engineering is about the management of complexity, and if you've never worked on a complex system, you don't understand how to do that.
I’m 45. I didn’t start aggressively job hopping until I was 35, before then I stayed at one job for almost 10 years. I haven’t once had a problem finding a job quickly. I was a generalist when I was 35 and started down the road of specializing in the Microsoft stack in 2008. I start pivoting in 2016 to more architect level roles but still staying hands on but with more cross platform languages (.Net Core, Node, Python), I also spent the last two years getting a lot of experience with AWS from a development/Devops/netops standpoint.
I’m slowly getting more into the front end $cool_kids stack with React, etc.
But, I don’t do the blind resume submittals to job boards and applicant tracking systems. I keep a very strong network of external recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers.
I have never studied leetCode, and won’t go near a job that’s more concerned with how well I’ve read over “Cracking the Code” instead of how well I can architect a system.
How many employers do you find yourself needing to exclude because of the “no Leetcode” thing? Do you think you’re sacrificing anything in the way of comp by doing so?
None. I don’t live on the West Coast and that seems to be mostly a west coast thing. According to all of the local salary surveys and anecdotal information that I’m getting from recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers, I’m slightly on the right side of the bell curve for architect/principal engineer, etc. Not bragging, the salary and cost of living is well below the west coast.
My last job where I thought I was being hired as a senior developer I was asked “what was my 90 day plan to create a modern software department to create two green field projects”. It ended up they were looking for a dev lead.
The next job interview I spent most of my time white boarding architecture. I wasn’t asked a single development question. I just explained what I did on my last job.
As far as comp, if I were in a position to travel a lot, there are plenty of consulting companies willing to pay me more than I am making now - all I would have to do is send out a few emails to
my network. Again not bragging. After working 20+ years if you can’t get some type of consulting gig you’re doing it wrong.
Interesting. What region do you live in, and how do you think your bottom line compares to what you’d see in a comparable role in the Bay Area?
I’m not really architect / principal level just yet (probably 3-5 years of continuous improvement from that I would say), but I feel like I’m just barely getting ahead as a senior making $200k paying $2300/month in rent with no hope to buy and about a 40-60 minute commute (depending on whether I drive to BART or walk). Just wondering if there’s something better out there.
My commute is 30-40 minutes depending on traffic and we just bought a 3000 square foot 5 bedroom/3.5 bath house + a large office, new build in a great school system for $335K with 5% down. Our mortgage all in is a little less than $2100/month.
The most senior hands on developers/individual contributors/team leads can make between $130K-$160K. Even with that, it leaves more than enough to max out a 401K, and have enough fun money to do most of the things we want.
But like I said, just from talking to hiring managers over “informal lunches”, there are positions for overpriced “digital transformation consultants”, “enterprise architects”, etc. where you can get $200K and live in a lower cost of living area as long as you live near a major airport.
Excuse me, but at $200k you're making $100k net so about $8k per month. With rent at $2.3k, you should be able to save enough to buy something at some point, no? Or at least you could rent something more expensive, closer to work?
> Excuse me, but at $200k you're making $100k net so about $8k per month. With rent at $2.3k, you should be able to save enough to buy something at some point, no? Or at least you could rent something more expensive, closer to work?
Without knowing regional pricing information it's hard to say they "should be able to save enough to buy something at some point".
Two words: Bay Area. There really is no possibility for me to afford a ~$1M house anytime soon, and renting significantly closer to work (as in a 30 minute public transportation commute) would cost me at least double what I pay now.
It’s more a matter of how far behind I am. I spent a lot of years being underpaid and my net worth is about $-100k due to student debt. I am also not in my 20s anymore. I have also only been a software engineer for about 5 or 6 years.
My wife had about 130k in student loan debt when we married, and we went on a ten year repayment plan. Total payment is about $1700 a month...
So your rent plus debt servicing should be around $4000... leaving your around $4000 a month for everything else. You should be able to live pretty well on that! That is more than most people make total.
Well, I’d also like to retire in less than 20 years, so, factor that in (probably $2000-2500/month). Food, utilities, insurance, car expenses (I don’t drive much, but it’s fairly essential for me to have a car to get certain places; it’s also paid off, fortunately), etc. I think you can see where this is going.
> Well, I’d also like to retire in less than 20 years
Don't we all.
> Food, utilities, insurance, car expenses (I don’t drive much, but it’s fairly essential for me to have a car to get certain places; it’s also paid off, fortunately)
We all also pay for this.
> probably $2000-2500/month
Dude you still have $1000 probably free just chilling if you are strict.
I don't get this, "you are not where you should be" mindset.
The student debt sucks, but you are doing extremely, extremely well. Making more than some doctors.
What if I told you I was 35? 45? 55? Does your perspective on “not where I should be” change given my already stated negative net worth? I’m old enough to be worried about being employable in this industry in 10 years. Do you not see how a 20 year time horizon for retirement, starting not from 0, but from -100k, is a source of anxiety?
As for “doctor money”, according to https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2018-compensation-overvie... I make below the average salary for every physician specialty except public health & preventative medicine, and I’m several years older than the typical newly minted physician.
I also live in an area where you need to make at least $80k or so to qualify for a 1br apartment, according to the “3x rent in gross salary” rule used by a lot of landlords. With my large, fixed expenses (student loans), I’m not convinced moving to a lower CoL area actually improves my bottom line, either.
I’m not poor, and, like I said, I’m getting ahead slowly now, but I’m by no means rolling in it.
I know where you are coming from. Because of $bad_life_decisions until I was 35 and purposefully choices since then, I am behind financially by any objective measure.
You could say my career trajectory is behind being in my 40s and still being an individual contributor, but I don’t see any scenario where I would have wanted to be a person manager. (Been there done that. Went screaming back to an IC role).
But, I do see a narrow path where I can retire at the standard retirement age and be okay with a paid off house, enough savings to be okay, and hopefully social security between me and my wife collecting half of mine instead of her own.
Depending on your age you might care about what it would be like in a few more decades (I honestly don't know, it's far inland but Florida is low-elevation & would certainly get very hot either way).
Why don’t you say your salary and location? Geeez you’re on an unknown Internet forum. Please do us a favor by joy just bragging about your sitch but also giving us a clue what’s possible.
I've got about 20 years of professional coding under my belt including a 5 year stint doing a lot of job hopping/consulting. I'd never even heard of leetcode until this post and won't bother to even visit the website. For most of my career I've been in the group giving interviews. I don't recall having ever seen it mentioned on a resume. It's a complete and total nothing for any employer I've ever worked for/with.
Based on the comments in this thread, I'm guessing leetcode has done some successful marketing in the valley. I'm an East coaster.
I’m using leetCode in the genericized sense of “Kleenex” instead of tissue or “Googling something”. Basically any algorithm style interview.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see if your company is solving hard problems (tm) or problems at a scale that has never been done before why you need smart people (tm). But I find it ridiculous that some companies care about how well you can do esoteric algorithms when they are hiring you to do yet another software as a service CRUD app or some internal bespoke app that will never see the light of day outside of the company.
I’m not even convinced knowing hard computer science is important in most jobs. One of the best developers I know graduated from a well known but not well regarded private for profit college. Didn’t know much hard computer science but he reads like crazy about best practices when it comes to writing software. His code and unit tests are things of beauty to maintain. We worked together at three separate jobs. He’s also in his mid 40s and he codes on his own time and does side projects like someone in their 20s.
I got my start doing assembly in the 80s as a teenager, bit twiddling C on x86 PCs and mainframes for a decade, but none of that matters when I am spending half my day as a “full stack developer” and the other half as the de facto “AWS Architect” (in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king).
> I have never studied leetCode, and won’t go near a job that’s more concerned with how well I’ve read over “Cracking the Code” instead of how well I can architect a system.
I am 33.5, and looking for a job in India. I absolutely abhor doing leetCode, but atleast here it seems to be the only way - even within my own connected network.
I'm 32 right now and am considering specializing in the microsoft stack as well. I've come across tons of not so sexy, large companies using .NET while working as a contractor at my current job. Companies like Ford or Blue Cross for example.
They don't seem to have the same age bias as these startupy nodejs/react firms, and they pay just as well.
Wow, this description is eerily similar to my own history and current situation - only real difference is a focus on Azure rather than AWS!
I've always been a strong believer in being a generalist - at least in my experience, the best developers and architects have some knowledge of networking, Windows, Linux, security etc. Basically, they know enough that they can quickly get to grips with almost anything that's thrown at them.
In IT, employers find it much easier to scale with junior employees. It is not about their age, but rather the fact that they are cheap and available. Old people tend to be expensive and less likely to change jobs.
Job ads address people more likely to be a good fit. That's it.
I'm in that age bracket myself, and have fortunately avoided most of the abuses described here.
Like the other posters are saying, the real problem is that learning how to develop good software (or any other technical product) takes time. This is an experience-based subject - art? craft? - and while I have seen many very talented younger engineers and developers, their lack of experience with a whole list of factors that don't involve slapping some code into an IDE, or what have you, usually means they end up being far less productive than people like to assume.
Bay Area culture has produced a lot of great things, but this stereotype has got to go.
Mid-40s, feel like I have been discriminated against based on age more than once. Not being one to fruitlessly blame my misfortune on things I can't change, I exited the rat race and started consulting. Doubled my already staggering pay working fewer hours, and from home. I realize this is not an easy thing to get up and running, but do at least consider finding your true value on the open market. The results could be surprising. The companies do need people who know what not to do, rather than just young-uns who do stupid things faster, with more energy.
I did this for 4 years and went back to full-time management. Even in NYC, I struggled as I (as a DevOps guy) never had the latest tech. If they needed AWS, I got AWS (experience and certs) but then they wanted Docker. Now Kubernetes. Despite years of programming experience in three languages, I still get whiteboarded. The point is, I was being treated like a full-time employee in consultant interviews. A few smaller clients I picked up were miniscule hours, we're talking 8 hours a month at most of work. Here on HN, these startup types wanted me to work for 50 pct less my rate.
I'd love to consult one day, but I haven't cracked that code. I have 18 years of systems automation, operations, and now management experience.
What "interviews" are you talking about? Your track record is supposed to speak for itself. The interview boils down to sitting down with a client and figuring out what they need and whether you can do it. Because you're a contractor you can be fired effortlessly, so there's very little risk for the client. You can also fire the client, so there's little risk for you.
I think you either don't have the right track record, or you're selling yourself incorrectly, by which I mean you're charging too little. Whiteboard interviews are out of the question as a contractor: I simply don't have time for this circus. One thing that helps with such things is pricing your services right. And that means charging more than you think is reasonable. The more you can charge, ironically, the easier these discussions get. The effect compounds further if you have several satisfied former clients who can give references.
My selling point is really simple, too: you've tried and you've failed, now let me show you what's possible.
Well it's partially a marketing issue, to answer your question of why interviews. It's recruiters who find me, and they present me as a contractor (when I signal I'm searching for this). The people I used to work with tend to ping me for full-time roles only, unfortunately, and word-of-mouth seems to be a common contractor route.
Finding clients outside of that requires what I expect is a social media presence, possibly publications and talks. None of which I've undertaken.
No one trusts the "resume/CV" track record, not in contracting and not in full-time roles. It's either word-of-mouth or some other method of trust, if it isn't a set of interviews.
I've picked up a decent full-time role to refurnish my image, as running an infrastructure with staff, you'd expect, should be impressive.
I'm skeptical of the contract market.
And to go back to the original thread, I found myself getting spurned due to age for any role which wasn't technical/managerial in the world of full-time work once I went back to it.
That's highly individual. I did it by leading several fairly involved projects at Google over the course of nearly a decade, and then building two high performance engineering teams from scratch outside Google. I also built a bit of a rare talent stack, which happens to be in heavy demand right now. If you do a good job, people want to work with you again, and don't mind paying pretty penny.
Young people have more variable potential. If you hire a young person they might be 100x or 10x or 1x in a couple years. If you hire an old person you already know they aren’t 100x or 10x otherwise they would be above you in the org chart or retired. There’s nothing wrong with 1x, but preference for young people is common sense all else being equal. And it’s never equal in terms of salary expectations and extra effort.
Advancement is typically a pyramid, which means not everyone can reach the top. It is impossible for everyone to “be above you in the org chart or retired.”
You made my point better than I did. “Not everyone can reach the top.” Young people have had fewer opportunities to reach the top. Not being at the top is a negative signal that gets stronger every year.
There’s no room for those young people, so the chance one will be 100x, whatever you mean by that, is effectively 0. Young people are malleable and cheap. The majority of workers are never more than commodity labor. As the saying goes anyone can be replaced. That being the case cheaper and easier to exploit is what’s being optimized for. But they’ll let you think you got a shot at 100x, it’s how the scam work kiddo.
If they're 100x in a couple of years (assuming such individuals exist) then you'll be paying them a hell of a lot more in a couple of years. What you're saying would be reasonable if they were signing employees to long-term contracts at a fixed wage based on current productivity.
If your business is a financial equivalent portfolio allocation of too many lottery tickets and not enough stably yielding bonds and securities, you're gonna have a bad time. Predictably, many businesses run with such a naive mentality fold.
Not to double comment, but the other completely fallacious part about this line of reasoning is a conflation of team productivity with individual productivity. Different beasts. A productive team with high cohesion will outproduce a team full of all-stars with low cohesion by at least 10:1, sometimes north of 100:1, but that's mostly because the team full of all-stars with low cohesion works _so_ poorly. One is dysfunctional, the other is not.
Am 52. Served as IBM’s “corporate webmaster” in the 1990s (sort of like being CTO but without the cool executive hat). Corporate Webmaster was responsible for all technical operations of IBM’s corporate sites (from systems administration to application development), as well as theoretically responsible for all IBM web sites. As well as serve as the single point of contact inside IBM for anything “internet”.
Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.
To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.
And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.
I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.
I was burned out after 5 years of 7x24x365. Days were filled with conference calls and escalations about conference calls, nights were filled with the technical work I was supposed to be doing during the day. I was prohibited from filing patents due to some sort of corporate reporting arcanity, which derailed my technical career. I had (and apparently still have) an extremely negative reputation in the executive ranks from all of the times I told people that no, they couldn't run an IBM site under their desk, and many others.
Appreciate that it's not similar to today's concept of CTO. I was not only responsible for all IBM web sites, I was expected to design, develop, deploy, manage, diagnose software for all IBM web sites, even those that I had no direct control over. IBM’s own software products tended to trail what we were doing in production by 12-24 months, when they were actually released.
Hence a classic toxic 24/7 role where you're expected to double as operation and developer and database and architect and all. You should have run away much quicker.
Nothing to do whatsoever with CTO. It's not event relevant to anything executive or management.
I hope that you can describe your position in a more positive light than this text and without alluding to being CTO, because both will get you rejected fairly quickly in any interview.
Mostly retired. Stopped worrying about finding FTE 5-6 years ago and focused on making the cash I had work for me on a more immediate time scale. I do some advisory work with local startups for equity. Angel invested for awhile but stopped as mentioned elsewhere in an earlier thread.
Would love to work again in tech but have never cracked getting on recruiters’ radar and I have better things to do than play whack—a-mole with the latest and greatest in applicant tracking systems automated decision algorithms.
I'm going to rock your world: almost nobody uses the keyword scanners in the ATSs. Sending a resume is mostly a waste of time, if you find a job you like just speak to someone that works at that company, preferably the hiring manager, and your likelihood of at least getting an interview goes up by about two orders of magnitude. Happy to teach you other tricks if you care for it.
> I'm going to rock your world: almost nobody uses the keyword scanners in the ATSs. Sending a resume is mostly a waste of time, if you find a job you like just speak to someone that works at that company, preferably the hiring manager, and your likelihood of at least getting an interview goes up by about two orders of magnitude. Happy to teach you other tricks if you care for it.
How are you supposed to find out the hiring manager's name from a job post? I'd be curious to hear some of these tricks.
I work for a company with 4500 employees. I assure you, one of the obvious patterns based on first and last names will get you most email addresses there.
> How are you supposed to find out the hiring manager's name from a job post? I'd be curious to hear some of these tricks.
Go to meetups. User's groups. Any gathering of technical people. Important people tend to network, but they may not be the "regulars" as they are busy people.
I know more than a couple of technical/user groups where a relatively unknown person giving a good presentation is likely to wind up with an interview on the spot ... if not an actual consulting/job offer.
The key is a good presentation. The content shows your technical chops and the presentation shows your communication skills.
And, while lots of people say "have a GitHub and reference it", I'm going to caution about this. Just like an art portfolio, only put things you can proud of in there if you're going to make it public and reference it for employment. I may make you show me at the interview on your laptop and talk about it and it shouldn't embarrass you.
(Personally, I don't check GitHub unless someone points me at it explicitly.)
Linkedin. If you can't find the person who manages that department, find anybody in that department and ask them about the job and the manager. One "trick" is to let them know you're looking to apply at the company and want to ask them for career advice. Most people love giving advice.
As a 50+ chap, I had an instance of a top company, referred by friend, whole team up for it and to not even get an interview as I got `filtered` by HR and the recruitment process.
Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`.
Equally in my early years pre PC mainstream days, there was an age bias towards older people. With many personal experiences upon that in that time/culture - including, believe it or not `overqualified` (they sat a coding exam and I found mistakes in the exam) for a COBOL job at a bank aged 19 (had 3 years work under my belt already in the field). Recruitment agent said it was because I knew more than the boss and he didn't like that. Was a time also back then when the boss would of previously done the job of those under him in such institutional culture of that time.
Dare say starting out today is easier than it was pre internet boom.
I'm sure there are others who equally have experienced agisim on both ends of the scale in IT.
As a gen-x'er, I wonder about being caught in the middle. I was too young for boomers (started as weekend tech in 9th grade). Now I sense I'm too old for millennials.
Supposedly both demo groups strongly prefer their own. Whereas us x'ers were so few, we just had to get along with everyone.
As a gen-xer, I fucking love where I'm at. I have the perfect combination of knowing how to to fix my toilet and my wifi (was third engineer at Aruba - suck it).
A friend of mine is in his 50s he got tired of being overqualified for jobs. So he sent in applications for CEO of Microsoft etc and got the overqualified letters back. It is ridiculous if you ask me, and he is only overqualified because of his age.
That is one worth framing and adding to the CV. My personal favorite was time IBM said something could not be done, I knocked up some code 30 minutes later doing what they said could not be done. Took IBM a week (which entailed contacting outside consultants) to come back and say my proposal would solve the problem.
I really wished the response of "over qualified" was made illegal as we all know it is used as a way to say no for reasons that are not legal...like age discrimination etc or other forms of discrimination (note I'm autistic spectrum).
Oh well, I've grown to loath and borderline hate HR departments over the decades thru such experiences. Which have been predominantly staffed by females, not that I'm drawing any conclusion to that, but it has been solid observation over my entire working career and at the very least, curious. Maybe there needs to be a drive for sexual equality with HR departments :/
Usually they staff a female minority in HR to make up for lack of diversity in other departments. In some companies I worked at they upgraded a administrative assistant to supervising manager of IT because she was female and they needed more diversity. She was not qualified for the job, and I'd feel better if she was qualified for the job. But that is just my opinion.
Dare say starting out today is easier than it was
pre internet boom.
Hard to say without a time machine, but from talking to juniors & students (I have a lot of friends who teach) it sounds harder to get that first job than it was when I was starting out (I'm 36).
My completely unscientific gut feeling was that it was the easiest to get started in tech in the late 90s & right as the industry started recovering from the .com bust (~2005, when I got my first "real" full-time developer job).
The funny things is that they were already teaching programming in secondary schools when I was a kid (i.e. it wasn't really 'exotic' to be a programmer) but even in my most recent job most programmers are in their 20s.
I used to get, can you start Monday? pretty often after an hour interview back in the day. Sure miss that, and considering I’m a much better dev now it’s a travesty.
Had that, also for contract work that in itself can be a deal breaker as one case I said I could start a few days later and they gave the contract to somebody else. But then contracting and perm work, you can appreciate and respect that aspect.
AT 36, you would of hit the internet explosions about spot on, prior to the PC days with mainframes and `corporate/government ` structure it was not easy at all. Late 90's was the internet boom time and there was a real sudden shortage in skills back then and it was easier.
I was taught programming in school (well, actually self taught from magazines like Byte, computer World and Unix World and a ZX81) in the early 80's, was an acoustic coupler modem that took 30 mins to get a stable line to a mainframe at some college our school had some airtime upon. Today, far more accessible, but back then, was hard on many levels.
Biggest hurdle was HR and one role I went for (was 20 then), had two interviews, HR and then the tech people. Litterly had HR peon say to me "That's a lot of money for somebody your age" and really was a very uncomfortable attitude. Blow the tech interview out of the water, got offered the job and more money than the HR peon bismershed for somebody my age and turned the job down flat solely due to the attitude of the HR peon and made that very clear. Took another job offer, for less money outer principle. Though turned out to be a better job. But had I not had the attitude from HR, I'd of taken that job.
Lot changed in that 15 year gap between mid-30's aged people and people in their 50's today. But then much has changed on many levels and I'd say for the better overall, albeit the age discrimination thing still exists, they just moved the goalposts.
But IT is still a young industry, compare to say accountants. But then accountant qualification from a decade ago, still worth it's value today, not many tech certs/qualifications that you can say that about as the industry changes and is still evolving. That is kinda the crux and what makes IT as an industry, hard to compare to many other industries as IT is just more dynamic.
That said - COBOL has remained pretty darn static. But I moved out of that area decades ago (before you the internet boom and the time you got into tech).
But tech is a constant learning curve, that won't change soon either. Hence any job in tech is not just the job, but a full time education on top of that to stay current.
Yes, I'm sure I had it easier as there were a lot more jobs requiring programming at the turn of the century than 20 years prior! My point was - is it actually harder for people 15 years younger than me to start up?
Many examples of people in that age having started up on their own, be it some wondrous website thru to a mobile phone app.
Ease of access to consumers with the likes of ebay or app stores and lower running costs into breaking into those avenues have opened up many an avenue that was harder to access before.
But that is progress, come 50+, you may end up having the same perspective in relation to when you started out and starting out today.
>Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`.
I applied for a helpdesk position like this, once. Was required to take an IQ test and one of the questions during the interview was about what IRQ the keyboard was assigned to (you know, in the plug-n-play era, when IRQ and COM ports no longer were a "thing" to configure).
Got a response back, later, that I was overqualified.
I easily translated it to, "Wasn't willing to put up with our shit for so little pay."
Bullet dodged but there are some truly caustic employers out there, who will try to gatekeep every possible variance that they can think of, to keep the line toed[0].
Make sure you have something to brag about in github. Highlight it on your resume and cover letter. As others said, contact hiring managers directly. But most importantly, figure out what is it you enjoy working on 8+ hours every day, and look for companies that would let you do that.
It's a capitalistic market. When everyone does X you have to figure out what Y is which will differentiate yourself. When everyone uses linkedin to target then you have to find other channels.
Everyone should read Traction by Garbriel Weinberg. It's for startup marketing but job searching is basically marketing yourself in a world that has one dominant channel (recruiters). The efficacy of different channels is time varying as they get saturated- You have to find the one that works for you at any given time
I'm almost 50 myself. I've been coding for 25+ years, and am looking for a new job myself. I have one at a well-known company but I want to make more hay while the sun shines. I currently have a week of onsites booked with the Big N, and I'm in study mode. Because I'm still technical and hands-on and never became a manager, I haven't had any trouble getting contacted constantly for new jobs.
Same, except add nine years to the age. :). I actually did try management back in the late 90's and early 2000's, first at a startup I cofounded, then at a mid-size public company after the startup was acquired. I basically hated my life from the point where the startup stopped being a bunch of us coding and playing Quake III at night, to the point where I quit the public corp. Went back into engineering, stayed there, work at home and love what I do. Have no lack of opportunities being floated my way.
Same, technical and hands on, people love my work. Had a lot of trouble getting hired last time. Was unemployed for a year and whole family was a mere couple of weeks from homelessness when a govt contract finally came through. Next time I won’t be so lucky as little has changed, and feel the winds of recession picking up.
MY next door neighbor worked for IBM in OS/2. when IBM stopped supporting OS/2 they laid him off. He blamed Microsoft for it and refused to run Windows. I got him a copy of OpenSUSE from my computer because he refused to use Windows. He went to Linux, and had worked on the IBM Mainframes as well before. He had trouble getting hired because he was in his 60s. He recently died and had called himself a Windows Bigot because he refused to use or support Windows.
Anecdote: My dad (finance/accounting guy) lost his job in his 40's and was never able to find another one.
Thankfully my mom makes enough for things to work out, and they own a piece of rental property, and my dad stashed away a lot of money for retirement while he worked (to the dismay of my mother).
Additionally, the company I work at is half (or more) people hired straight out of college which kinda makes me feel weird. It's a small company that has been around ~15 years or so, and I feel like their hiring practices would lead to their ass getting handed to them in court.
I like the people I work with, but something definitely feels wrong.
Employment is not an efficient market. Transaction costs are very high, bidding is not public, and utility is a non-linear function of more than just compensation.
It’s not a market at all, because participation, realistically speaking, is involuntary for most sellers. It’s closer to a feudal contract than an actual market.
Yep. Glad that there are at least a few people whose brains haven't been turned to mush by decades of propaganda and inflexible market fundamentalist orthodoxy.
I think part of the problem is "protected classes". I learned the other day that if you're over 40 you're a protected class for engineering in California.
If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get rid of.
I still think we should have protected classes, but the protection needs to reach into hiring too. Maybe make companies have to submit written justification for not hiring someone in a protected class? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.
It's well known that the harder the government makes it to fire someone, the equally harder it will be to get hired. It's just that people don't want to believe it.
These days, holding all other factors constant, SV companies will generally hire {gay|female|trans|minority} candidates before {male|white|indian|asian}. So companies are apparently not at all concerned about hiring members of protected classes, rather they prefer to hire them.
Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a protected class, that's a subtly different argument....
Was completely with you until the last paragraph. As the poster above me says, the more you regulate hiring, the more reluctant companies are to do so. You can look at the entire continent of Europe for a 500 million person example of this- sclerotic uber-regulated hiring markets with intense bureaucratic rules around who can be hired or fired, who can be laid off, under what circumstances, etc. The end result of this regulation is dramatically higher unemployment rates and companies that are terrified to hire FTEs because it's so hard to get rid of a bad one.
Tend to agree with deregulating hiring but some economies with heavily regulated employment like Germany (I’ve lived there, it is a nightmare to fire grossly incompetent employees) have very low unemployment rates.
Hartz IV was successful. Germany decreased bureaucracy and employment protection/regulation to the extent that their unemployment rate went down massively. From 1994-2012 Competition Weighted Relative Unit Labour Costs in Germany declined by 30% and unemployment dropped from 12% to 5.5% from 2005 to 2012.
> The Hartz concept, also known as Hartz reforms or the Hartz plan, is a set of recommendations submitted by a committee on reforms to the German labour market in 2002. Named after the head of the committee, Peter Hartz, these recommendations went on to become part of the German government's Agenda 2010 series of reforms, known as Hartz I – Hartz IV. The committee devised thirteen "innovation modules", which recommended changes to the German labour market system. These were then gradually put into practice: The measures of Hartz I – III were undertaken between January 1, 2003, and 2004, while Hartz IV was implemented on January 1, 2005.
Worker protection isn't standardised. The countries with the lowest unemployment rates have relatively dynamic labour markets.
Try France: 8.7%, was 10% as recently as 2015. Italy: 10.2%
Of course, unemployment is much worse for young workers in these countries. If you can't fire anyone then hiring is risky, so jobs tend to end up taken by older workers who then "camp" in the jobs even if they suck. Reverse ageism at work!
I'm 48, on the West Coast, and recently finished interviewing, receiving multiple offers.
I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped.
This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on my butt, do what I love, and I get paid really well to do it. If interviewing is extremely hard and I have to study, yet again, at 48 so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who are so less fortunate than I am.
If leetCode is what you have to do to compete in your market so be it. In the grand scheme of things, it would be hypocritical for me to criticize someone for spending hours upon hours on leetCode considering the amount of time I’ve spent on books about architecture, spent a year learning the ends and out of AWS, and the time I spent networking.
Not to mention the fact that I will spend the next two year learning front end frameworks and Docker ecosystem. I’m 45
I bet you have fun learning, right? I actually find doing algorithms problems fun. If I didn't find them fun I don't think I would've done 250. I'm also spending a lot of time reading architecture books and learning AWS. React is probably next on my list.
That said, it sounds like you and I are both "cultivating" and "tending to" our profession. I think that's what it takes to stay competitive and have longevity imo.
I started out as a typical 12 year old computer geek. But, by the time I turned 35, I became much more cynical. Computers became a way to put food on my table. I don’t “have fun” with technology. I don’t hate my career by any means, but, I do what’s necessary to stay buzzword compliant.
I got into vicious codependent cycle with my job by the time I was 35. I didn’t know enough to be competitive and leave, I was bitter about my pay and they just kept me around because I knew where the bodies were buried. Since then, it’s all about optionality. If I go more than a month not enjoying my environment it’s time to leave.
I'm in the same boat as you were, I think. I like my company, but as the lead dev of a team in a big company I make a lot of technical decisions/reviews/collaborations... but others implement because I'm spending most of my time talking to the business, support, planning...etc. Not as much hands on.
Considering swinging the pendulum the other way to hands on technical again and let others do the BS work. Do you know anything about the north Atlanta market? Companies, salary range, culture? Or maybe ones to avoid...Thanks!
I think as our sector matures its more about emotional intelligence, and less about technical aptitude. I can’t help but think leetcode is a echo chamber. I personally disagree with this approach, I’ve met a few folks who think the CLI is useless and can be learned in a few days. But they score really well in algorithms.
With today’s data privacy concerns and tough European regulations I don’t think this attitude is acceptable.
I hope the field makes a return to appreciating fundamentals.
I get why companies want to use Leetcode for evaluation. It basically quantifies an applicant down to a number which makes hiring easier and more scalable. There's a lot less room for bias if every candidate can be boiled down to pass or fail by a single test.
That being said, I was on the hiring committee at my last job and personally, I found the best way to hire engineers is to just chat with them about previous projects. I'd usually run through one or two, "just confirming you can code" whiteboard questions and then ask them to tell me about a project they are proud of that they had a large part in. If you ask questions that dig into the project ("How did you do X?", "Why did you do Y?", "Now that it's over, what would you change?") you can usually get a pretty good idea of their skill level and knowledge as a developer as well as some great insights into their personality.
Obviously, that's much harder to scale and more subject to bias, but it worked for me.
In addition to being hard to scale and subject to bias, it's hard to know, even for you, if it was actually a good system or not. The best you can hope for is to have decent confidence it had a low false positive rate.
Short of industry wide collaboration with some kind of longitudinal study, getting an idea of what does and doesn't work in terms of false negatives is nearly impossible.
I think you can tell if it's a good system for your company. As an individual employer all I care about are:
1. are my false positives low?
2. is the time it takes to fill a position low?
If the answer to both of those questions is "yes" then the system is great for me (and I've seen the system described above provide affirmative answers to both these questions in a startup setting).
Determining whether a hiring system is locally good is significantly easier than determining if it's good in general.
You can say if it's acceptable ... but not necessarily good
The problem is that you don't know the cost of the false negatives; you don't know whether the people you didn't hire would have greatly improved your processes / code / business
Software is a collaboration. Almost by definition, all the stuff I don’t know how to do well is at least as important as the stuff I do, even as full stack person.
It’s probably not the stuff you know how to do that makes or breaks your company. Either someone else does it, or you “figure it out” and hopefully you know if you did it right before it’s too late.
How do you hire someone to be good at stuff you aren’t already good at? There’s gonna be a lot of those in the false negatives pile.
LeetCode is one path and it should be supported, but it shouldn't be the only path.
Realistically if a dev gets a leetcode interview they don't want to do, most of them can just cancel and likely get an interview with someone else next week if they're actively applying to jobs.
Love your attitude. I'm of the opinion that grinding through leetcode/hacker rank type exercises does improve your coding skills so I have no issue brushing up every time I'm on the market.
To that end, I'm 43 and last on the market a few months back, accepted an offer within a week of looking, had 3 pending final/onsites (including Amazon Seattle) and at least another half dozen in earlier stages that I shut down.
I do nothing to hide my age on my resume. Since turning 40 I've been on the market 3 times now, each time interviewing w/ 10-20 companies, and only once did I get the sense that agism was at play.
It was a bit, but only about 1/3 ended up with an onsite.
Part of the reason is because I hadn't spent as much effort on this earlier in my career; now with the concern of agism, every time I'm on the market I try to level up my skillset.
Oh, I agree that Leetcode can improve certain coding skills. But, are they the ones that matter for doing most software engineering jobs? The ability to write down algorithms on a whiteboard from memory alone is not a skill I’ve ever seen anyone use at any workplace outside of an interview room.
- Whenever I need to hop into a code share w/ a co-worker (I'm remote FWIW) the ability to quickly suss out an idea has greatly improved from having a decent aptitude with those types of exercises.
- Any non-trivial PR usually has at least a few portions that could be extricated to challenges like these. Being able to slice through issues like these in 15-30 minutes vs. say hours helps w/ my cadence. It lets me focus on the issues that are unique to the business.
The 30 minute pairing challenge we give during our interview (which I took myself) was something that was pulled and simplified from our source. I ended up having to implement something very similar just weeks after I started.
Of course being good are things like this isn't necessary to being an effective sr. developer, nor is it sufficient (even for an entry-level). But I do very much see it as a skill that is helpful and worth getting good at.
I love this. I think evaluating/interviewing is hard, should be much more about experience and past projects but so what if the industry has got it wrong, so what you have to study a little to get the job? The world is what it is. I think criticizing this from a ‘we could do better as an industry’ perspective is productive but from a personal perspective — today — what is going to get you hired is playing the game as it is.
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the software engineer's great stumbling block in his stride toward hiring fairness is not the Genius Asshole or the Bullshitter Who Can't Code, but the anonymous internet commenter, who is more devoted to 'pragmatism' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of reform to a positive peace which is the presence of fairness..."
I agree. Fairness in the sense of “equal ability to do the job results in the same outcome” would, indeed, get us there. The problem is that interviews don’t actually represent ability to do the job, not in this industry, at least.
I’m on a team with 8 other people right now. All 9 of us are quite capable at our jobs. We all got through some sort of interview process to get there, of course, but that just means we weren’t weeded out. We weren’t false positives, in other words.
But, why did we get through? Maybe the process really is capable of separating wheat from the chaff. Maybe the process works 85% of the time, and the 1 time it didn’t work in recent memory is someone who has already left the company. Maybe only capable people self select into the process for some reason. Maybe we’ve been phenomenally lucky.
The point is, just because a filter allows the right people through doesn’t mean it’s necessarily any good.
> The point is, just because a filter allows the right people through doesn’t mean it’s necessarily any good.
I define “good” and “right people” to be that which produces efficiency, quality, innovation in the business. So a good filter to me is good wrt these outcomes.
The industry is starving for ‘good people’ and ‘good outcomes’ and we should work to optimize this imo.
Any other measure divorced from outcome to me seems... weird.
I wish I could talk about our recruiting funnel numbers. It is the farthest thing from efficient.
Triplebyte claims the industry average onsite pass rate is in the neighborhood of 30% (https://triplebyte.com/blog/12-000-engineers-evaluated). I suspect that the huge majority of those who fail onsites get jobs. Is that efficient?
So anonymous internet comments are inhibiting the fair hiring practices of software engineers? Is there a study establishing the causal link between these two, because it sounds like spurious BS.
New graduates are even more out of touch. In what other industry can you graduate with a bachelors (or have no degree at all) and obtain a six figure job in return for a few weeks of studying?
Assuming your profile is anonymous, can you tell us what industry you're in and what your offers were paying? Just trying to get a comparison for what myself (and others) can expect.
I've been in several different industries, but what I do in particular is backend software engineering.
I don't feel comfortable saying here, but the Blind app is an excellent resource for finding what total compensation (TC) you can expect for different companies and years of experience (YOE).
Thanks, you've provided some great insights here - and appreciated those links. Will buy that O'Reilly book!
Mid 40s myself, stayed in one tech stack for too long but have been redeeming myself in the past few years with .net core, AWS, Docker and trying to get into React.
I find myself struggling most with the front end bits, but it's just a question of staying with it.
Have always loved tech, and highly passionate about it. Having a family with a kid on the ASD has really restricted available hours to tinker though, that's my main challenge.
Anyway I found what you and others here wrote quite motivational, so thanks again.
One thing that I'd like to mention that I didn't before is that the interview process can be taxing, draining, and it can be an emotional roller-coaster. Try to stay positive and keep at it. Good things will come!
Cheers. I'm a FTE presently, but have always got to look forward so whilst no immediate pressure I've learned that there's really no resting on one's laurels.
And yes can confirm that when I had to go through the process, and was less prepared, it was certainly very draining. So spending time learning/staying on top of things in peace time will certainly help during "war". :)
Staying physically healthy, lifting weights etc is another thing that hasn't been raised so far, so would just like to put that in. Can always adjust perception through that, and also it is something we truly need to be doing now that we're getting older. It also helps for mental health.
Sweet, thanks! The part I struggle with in interviews is more on playing the game. If someone asks "how would you build a parking lot?" or "how would you design a CI system for a team of 8 developers?", I struggle to keep it simple. Making something usable is actually way easier when working with someone who has thought about what they want and/or are participating. It's like "I don't want a parking lot, you do, so tell me about why you want one". Basically I want to avoid wasting the "client's" resources until I have more information, but system design interviews are not in initial kick off meetings where you go away and come back with a few ideas that don't suck. They are accepting that someone wants proof you can design a contrived system neither of you truly care about while they out you on the spot.
The part that is missing from nearly all interviews are an opportunity for the company to sell itself to the interviewee. So as the interviewee, I'd like to say that if you make me jump thru some hoops because you feel like I should go through the same hazing process you went thru when interviewing, I am going to think that you are only focused on what I can do for you.
How about this, as an interviewer, say something like... "This design question is gonna suck because I don't know how to ask it better, but if you can just hang in there long enough to help me understand you can think about something non-trivial, that'd be fabulous. We both know you're smart, and I just need to imagine working with you in something complex."
how would you design a CI system for a team of 8 developers?"
My last three jobs I was hired as the “adult supervision” as either an individual contributor who was more equal than others or as an official dev lead. I was specifically asked by the director those types of questions and how would I rewrite a 20 year old PowerBuilder app that had been maintained by two “developers” who had been their for 20 and 13 years.
I went through the training process they would go through, setting up source control, setting up development, QA environments, automated testing, and CI/CD.
Then he was shocked when I said that I wouldn’t rewrite it from the ground up. I would upgrade to a newer version of PowerBuilder that supported COM, concert the whole app to a COM object, put a C#/WebAPI wrapper around it, write some automated integration reads and contract out some front end developers to put a web interface on it.
Then slowly move the PB logic to C# and keep the stored procedures after upgrading to the latest version of sql server.
Finally move the stored procs to code.
All this to say, that’s what’s wrong with some “senior developers”. They’ve spent their entire career at large companies where they haven’t had a chance to work up and down the entire stack. If you spent your entire career “coding” at a large company, you’re not that much more valuable to most companies than someone with 5 years of experience b
At that job we had to hire some overpriced/clueless “AWS consultants” since I didn’t know AWS at the time. Now I could manage that. I still wouldn’t try doing anything on the front end. There are people much better than me.
I really like studying. Like, my list of things to learn more about in CS/software engineering/Math alone is probably longer than I'm going to get to before retirement... which, if I'm lucky, will consist in no small part of studying things and working on personal projects. I don't understand people who say they don't want to be immortal, they'd get bored. I can sortof imagine my psyche eventually crushing itself under the weight of its own history but... boredom? Nope. Too much interesting stuff to learn/try, even at the scale of challenge available to us now.
So, trust me when I say I don't object in the slightest to being asked to study and learn things. LeetCode-style problems look like one form of recreation to me.
And yet, I still think this comment is shortsighted because:
* I'd guess a lot of what's on LeetCode isn't exactly untrodden territory for any developer that got their start before 1995.
* Distinguishing oneself can work in the individual case, but it generalizes poorly. Imagine employers and would-be job-seekers alike internalize LeetCode knowledge as a standard distinguishing mark. Like college degrees, distinguishing points often over time become standard expectations. The likely outcome is that about as many devs in their 20s & 30s can brandish the same "distinction" that devs 40+ can and the incentives to prefer youth perform about the same.
Individual efforts to improve ones lot are a good place to start, but they rarely solve systemic problems.
This is curious to me, and it's not just in your comment that I've seen this.
But why is there this assumption that if someone studies Leetcode and algorithms then it means that they can't do anything else? Why is there this all or nothing mentality?
If someone studies Leetcode and algorithms, wouldn't one assume they know other things as well in the software engineering realm? I have plenty of friends in the Bay Area who are thriving at FAANG who studied algorithms and Leetcode intensely.
How much time have they spent using the standard frameworks that most companies use everyday? Could they even model a standard relational schema? Do they know anything about automated testing?
If they were told a web page was slow would they know enough architecturally to know how to find the bottleneck and no the solution for solving it? No the answer is not based on finding the o(n) complexity of reversing a binary tree.
> I have plenty of friends in the Bay Area who are thriving at FAANG who studied algorithms and Leetcode intensely.
And I've seen developers come from doing Node green field APIs at Netflix to waist deep in a 15 year old Java application with Spring MVC and some underlying Struts yet to be removed and don't understand why debugger stopped going any deeper and they lost where they start 10 classes ago from shared modules.
Then they don't understand how refactoring a core message for alerting customer across the sight has tight coupling, wanted to something fancy and broke the key business features, try to argue it's better but a business unit just list functionality of it's product. Instead of researching, and coming up a plan with a team to refactor using TTD and Strangle Vine method from the legacy tightly coupled code, to a separate module with better testing and following SOLID principles.
Absolutely. Unless you're working on a greenfield project or refactoring code for extreme performance, understanding the operational side of the business will get you more points towards the mythical 10x programmer status than algorithms.
I can't count the times I've seen scope creep and deadline slippage because the developer didn't really understand the need & use case and built something other than what was required.
The leetcode angle at least makes interviews much more predictable and easier to prep for. The Google-style interview is well studied and documented by this point, like an SAT with an answer key you can study beforehand.
I'm not 48, I'm younger, but in my 30's. I only started the LeetCode study grind about a year or so go, but not consistently. I just got back from my onsite at a Big-N and pretty much bombed it. I gut nervous and forgot the easiest of questions. I lost my confidence. My mind went blank, my hands, nerves shaking. Couldn't write complete code or even sentences I think at times. It was bad. I was intimidated for no reason.
I am having very difficult time getting the offers (duh, when performing like this). Did you always get to receiving offers? I seem to always get the, we decided to go with another candidate... line after my onsite.
I've only had 2 company's fly me out so far and the only companies that I have gotten offers at don't do LeetCode. It's extremely frustrating or maybe I'm just not prepared well enough yet and need to be more consistent with my study and practice (and don't pay as much either) or maybe I'm just not smart enough. I feel stuck.
Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity.
> I gut nervous and forgot the easiest of questions. I lost my confidence. My mind went blank, my hands, nerves shaking. Couldn't write complete code or even sentences I think at times. It was bad. I was intimidated for no reason.
This happens to me too.
> Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity.
Dude just try for companies on the west coast. Why is this the end all be all? Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Charlotte, Raleigh, Colorado Springs. . . So many cities with low CoL and six figure salaries for Developers, Security Engineers, Linux Admins, Infrastructure Engineers.
You even have Denver, DC, NYC, Charlotte, Arlington, Seattle, Tampa, Minneapolis, so many options. Stop limiting yourself San Francisco when there are so many great cities, with awesome opportunities.
I'm currently in Minneapolis, downtown proper. I even own a condo in the middle of downtown. I don't even need a car and buses galore and multiple trains as well as a skyway for bad weather all within a block or less. I have Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Mall of America at my access. Oh, I'm also making 6 figures already.
That said, doubling my salary a Big-N for a few years and getting experience at a larger tech company is what I'm mostly chasing at the moment. I want the experience, I want to see what it's like for myself. I can just rent out the condo I have now easily, pack a bag of clothes and go.
I still require to work in a company where my manager/boss/CTO know much more than me. I'm almost 40. It's really hard to work for a 20-something guy who has almost no experience and is happily making all the mistakes he could read in books about.
Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic.
When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing teams. There must be something wrong with you, so I cannot pass your papers to the client."
Still, looking for a job is a very traumatic experience. The companies are looking for unicorns: young, cheap, without family (aka drinking in evenings, working on weekends), with lots of experience, and academic knowledge (which will never be used).
A couple of times I heard from guys, who would be my managers "oh, I'd love to have your experience"... the rest of the interviews went smoothly. In all the places I even didn't get to the step where they asked for the money requirements. They just didn't answer.
I'm looking for a remote job now. I even made a nicely stripped resume on one page. My normal has 3 pages. It's a very traumatic experience, especially that most of the remote companies require knowing almost only some new stuff, totally ignoring my 18 years of experience in everything else.
Btw... a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough to make surgeries on his/her own. A programmer of my age is usually a useless resource, which is happily replaced with someone just after the college.
All this makes me sad. The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s.
No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years.
In fact, I negotiated not to be a team lead at my current job.
Not only that, but I don't want to be hired to fix some old VB6 app or write Crystal Reports. If I'm ever desperate for a job I would change my tune, but that's a different situation.
I took off anything related to C for a similar reason. While C and C++ have a special place in my heart, I was interviewing for a C# position around 4 years ago and I had an interviewer spend 5-10 minutes on C minutiae even though it had nothing to do with the job just to prove how smart he was.
I got the job. But, when I interview there are certain things I want to emphasize and that wasn’t one of them.
>My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s.
This is very culture specific.
Example: Like you, I usually keep a revolving ~10 years history on my CV. As the years progress, I drop anything > 10 years, as it's really no longer relevant.
Anyways, I was pointedly asked one time during an interview, recently, for a company in a different country, "Where's the rest of your work history since university?"
That was almost 20 years ago, now. You have any idea just how long my CV would be, now, with all of that information?
My solution to this has generally been to add a
"1997 - 2000 Various
Previous work history available upon request" at the bottom.
And then just carry a copy or two of the full CV with you to the interview. If someone wants to see it, let them. Generally interviewers have just been curious.
Even though I think ageism is overblown in the software development industry if you are buzzword compliant, I don’t take any chances. I leave everything off before 2008, my year of graduation and I go completely clean shaven and bald in an interview. (I’m Black it’s not abnormal). Most non-Blacks have no idea how old I am without the obvious signs of gray hair or a receding hair line.
White men can shave bald too, and anyone can dye their hair. There's even a famous hair dye brand that specifically advertises its product for use in gaming age doiscrimination! The product (Just For Men) and ads are gender-discriminatory, of course!
Everything. After 10 years it doesn’t really matter how much experience you have. I took off the two jobs I had between 1996-2008 because the skillset was outdated (VB6, Perl, Classic ASP) or something I didn’t want to do (C and C++). I’ve been doing C# since 2008 so I don’t think that will be irrelevant even in 2022.
> "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing team
So they are 23 year olds write lots of managing experience? Sometimes I just dislike this industry with its title inflation. I am 33 having been a recruiter for a short stint, I can tell you most of them just checkbox candidates because they have no idea what they are hiring. As they say, no one ever got fired buying an ibm.
There are 23 year olds who don’t have the technical chops, so rather than being fired, they are put on a management track. This started to happen around 2000.
Back when I hired into my company in ‘96 (I’m 47 now and 23 years at the same place), all the managers were in their 50’s and 60’s, who had done real engineering.
Then they become younger and younger, and eventually my manager was an idiot in his late 20’s whose relevant technical experience was “designing a power supply for an FPGA”, with me in my 40’s and an expert in my field. I told them I was leaving, so they gave me a promotion, and now I report to a 50 something female. She is a good manager.
Fortunately I’m at they point now where I’m the graybeard in the basement who gets to solve all the hard problems.
> a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough
Forget surgeons. My dentist is nearing retirement age and a younger dentist was brought in to be groomed to replace him. The youngish dentist on more than a few occasions mentioned he couldn't/wouldn't do certain procedures because one with more experience was necessary.
The 'young' dentist is no more than 30 years old. And in coding world, if you are over 30, you are considered over the hill.
> The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
What is valued is someone who can get productive with new trendy framework right away, while receiving minimal pay.
> I still require to work in a company where my manager/boss/CTO know much more than me. I'm almost 40.
This is a hard requirement to meet because as you go up the hierarchy of positions, the first level leader initially knows more than the junior contributors, but that pretty rapidly flips. Maybe the second level of leadership still knows more than the first, but almost never after that. How could someone be an expert practitioner in all the varied disciplines that they likely oversee? It skews towards general tech leadership quite quickly.
Is this in the US? The way you structure your writing makes me think you're not a native English speaker. What you could be describing is either a bias against hiring non-Americans (i.e. they should be cheap labour) or it's an issue from another country.
> The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
Experience in software development is sadly irrelevant for much of the software development industry. Instead what is today valued is knowledge of some new framework, the ability to describe data structures and algorithms (for interviews only), and the ability to pick-up (hack) at things quickly and without complaint.
All of these things are equally well done by a newcomer, of which there are ever increasing numbers. What future does someone increasingly older have over time, in an industry where the only qualifications (really) sought are "smart, eager, compliant, cheerful, and quick to learn"?
The ironic thing of course is that it's hard to imagine what actual advantage a practice of age discrimination might provide. All real and true criteria for a job can be tested for directly; there's no need to make age a dubiously-accurate proxy for any of those. It literally makes no sense. From the COMPANY'S point of view.
Yeah but you can do that by means of "salary and work hour discrimination," see what I'm saying? Those are things you can state outright, legally. Just make it clear that those are parameters of the job, and if they accept the job, they accept the job. I dunno maybe I've gone completely batshit crazy up in here.
No, you're right, they are just doing it the quick/lazy way. Older workers are also less liable to drink all the other corporate koolaid that might be harder to test for.
> All real and true criteria for a job can be tested for directly;
Analytical skills can be tested. It gets much harder on the creative skill and interaction skill side. Software is mostly about people communicating and making decisions. These standardized tests are only good to get accurate results in an area not so relevant later.
Sorry, I didn't mean to focus too literally on the idea of "testing." I'm using the term broadly to include things like pair-programming or job interviews (and other things, obviously), which are examples of "tests" that try to tease out some of the things you're talking about.
Is it just me or is there a way lower bar for evidence when it comes to age discrimination in tech on Hackernews compared to gender or race discrimination.
I’m not saying that it’s not a real phenomenon, but pretty much all the evidence I’ve seen is anecdotal or fairly weak.
While it’s true that a lot of older people are great programmers, I also think programming ability is only about 50% of what most people are looking for. The other 50% is about how well you work with others, and I have to say, when I read a lot of these anecdotes I can’t help but feel like some of people these people aren’t getting hired because they come off as stubborn assholes.
You're going to get anecdotes on HN because this is a discussion website.
Also, studies on this issue tend to not be well known without effort looking them up. The asshole factor is relevant but not as much as you would expect.
The actual perception that older workers haven't kept their edge is actually a common bias I've seen while gathering people for hiring. This bias is probably common amongst younger looking at older workers (eg 25 year old not hiring 35 year old) but also amongst older looking at less older. Eg a 50 year old won't hire a 40 year old because they wonder why the 40 year old even wants the position. Those two viewpoints seem to be recurring patterns at least in my experience.
You probably want hard data. I'm sure it is out here, Department of labor?
I'll go broad and say unemployment is below 4.0%, Fortune 500 have less age discrimination probably, and this particular comment section on Hacker News seems to be a lot of Bay Area/ San Fransisco perspective.
Attitude is the core of the problem. Another comment mentioned that if age discrimination happens, it happens primarily in VC culture areas like SV. I have a sneaking suspicion that high-tech workers don't really know what real unemployment looks like and are complaining about not getting to pick specifically where they want to work based on their tailor-made ideal environment that SV has spoonfed them about what a job should look like. Having the ability to even live in high profile areas and apply for high-tech jobs puts you several cuts above the rest of the non-tech working world and you will never truly be jobless. I would be grateful for that, personally.
EDIT: evidence of this in this thread said by others:
"Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism."
"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."
Head of HR once asked me what type of people we needed. I said we desperately needed older people. 20-year-old project managers don't have a clue. Company went under, he sells air-conditioning now.
> maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more clues?
Nah, I think management is just a job that requires experience and certification like any other job to be truly good at. People have this idea that "it's management, how hard can it be"... Turns out, really hard.
Only the qualified should be managers, not some 20 year old whose only qualification is being 'good with people'.
One thing I'm a bit confused about is why doesn't salary bidding fix this?
For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable?
Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x markup for it or something?
If there's a large pool of super skilled people begging for work I don't quite understand why someone wouldn't want to leverage that. I get why maybe you pay older workers less if you discriminate, but to not hire them at all seems strange.
> Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market?
On one cost issue. Let's say you're in a city other than SEA, LA, SF, NYC and Boston. A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year old. The cost of a 45 year old employee further increases with time due to that (over 10 years, from 45 to 55, an employee's health benefits cost can easily climb by an additional $5k-$6k per year). So if the salary in question is $90,000 (again, outside the elite tech cities), that bumps the cost of the employee considerably as they age. Some states - such as NY - have laws that alter this equation though. When an employee goes from eg 20 to 35 years old, there's a far more modest healthcare benefits cost increase (30%-40% increase would be more typical, starting from a lower base cost versus the 45 year old; from 40 to 55 the cost can easily double, from a higher starting point).
This is another serious issue that people frequently run into with the US healthcare system.
> A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year old.
Jesus freaking christ I never realised that being European. This is a game changer for older folks, I guess I'm out of luck if I ever want to move to the US and I'm already over 30, ha :/
As things are now, with US healthcare being out of control on costs, it depends heavily on your salary and employment context.
If you're making eg $150,000 or $200,000 in SF or NYC and working for a stable company, an additional $500-$600 per month for the company isn't nearly the concern versus if you're working in Cleveland earning $75,000.
If you're with a decent company with good benefits, it's also not an unusual situation more generally speaking. Half the country receives its healthcare benefits from an employer. Companies in the US are used to forking over very high costs for healthcare benefits. It's an accepted cost of employing people here. Being unemployed at 55 in the US, with weak savings (can't bridge yourself to the next job) and struggling job prospects, is a very serious problem however. That's the sort of situation you want to avoid in the US.
If you're self-employed the healthcare costs can be a real killer also, obviously unless you earn enough to offset it properly. As a very young entrepreneur I simply went without healthcare coverage. I was fortunate to not have any meaningful health problems in those years, it's blatantly a serious risk to take.
I'm not sure that's how employer-based group health plans work, but regardless, the gaping flaw in this theory is that a typical Recruiter and Hiring Manager wouldn't have the first clue about their employer's cost of benefits.
A common objection is that they will leave as soon as they can find a 'better' (higher-paying) job. So not worth it to invest in them.
This sucks, but it definitely explains a lot of discrimination at the higher-end of the scale. The OP has a 71-year-old who couldn't find work. It must be very difficult for an employer to agree to hire this person, get them trained up on their specific business processes, only for them to have a serious health issue (and/or die) inside of a year. I get that this can happen to anyone, but the likelihood is of course greater the older you get.
Maybe employers could take out some kind of insurance on their employees, with the cost based on the actuarial tables and taken out of the employees' salaries (kind of what you suggest).
The assumption that there exists some price at which the older worker is preferable is assuming that all software workers have a positive contribution and the only task is to value and compensate it roughly in proportion.
My experience suggests that a fair chunk of the population of software developers are incapable of sustainably creating positive business value overall (even if they were paid nothing). If that model is the correct one, part of what you're paying for in a younger applicant is they might be good, whereas with an experienced yet unskilled applicant, they might already be the equivalent of a scratched-off lottery ticket that isn't a winner. (There's no price at which you would buy it.)
Note that I'm well into the age range where I would be discriminated against if age discrimination were rampant. I'm also not claiming that experienced workers are more likely than younger workers to have a negative value. I'm merely claiming that their value is more likely to be determined and less likely to change in the future.
So you're saying that older workers being in the position of looking for a job are signaling that they're a scratched off lottery ticket for which the expected value of a jackpot is zero?
I’m saying that employers might be making that judgment when deciding not to hire a more experienced worker who interviews/tests the same as a less experienced worker. Same way a ballclub might invest in a rookie OF hitting 0.225 where a veteran with the same stats would be passed over.
I’ve not found age to be a good proxy for capacity or capability; I know exceptionally good (and many poor) coders at every age range I’ve seen in our field.
As for “looking for a job”, that’s a normal thing. Most experienced candidates will have a network to help, but moving to a new area or new field is also normal and hurts networking effectiveness.
I know this is just personnel experience so don't take it for much but I had to share an office with a 70 year old "programmer" who made three times my salary. I know this because my supervisor got drunk on a business trip and told me the day after he fired the guy. He was constantly asking everyone how to do the simplest of tasks and complaining about being under payed and discriminated against because of his age and was extremely condescending to anyone who tried to help him. He never finished any assignment even after a year and a half. The led developer who has been coding for 15 years took over his last project and had to throw out all the code because it was basically just copied and pasted from stackover flow. I don't think this guy ever really knew how to code well and had got into the industry in a time where programmers where rare. Honestly, for what I've seen all the over 40 crowd in the industry moves into management positions.
I'm 41 and still have recruiters contacting me and generally do well in interviews. I'm lucky in that the skills I have are harder to find (8 or so years doing iOS development). I also have to admit that one thing that helps me tremendously is that I look young. Just about everyone I work with assumes I am still in my 20s based on my appearance. They all act shocked once they do find out that I'm older. Looking young helps a lot with rapport in interviews since the interviewers feel more at ease that I'm "one of them" rather than some old guy.
Same age here. Mid-thirties career switch into tech. Landed my first tech job at 37 (consulting), first startup at 40 (data engineering) and just started a new startup at 41 (data engineering/devops). I'm probably the oldest at my company by a decade. I don't think I look particularly young, but maybe? I'm not saying age discrimination doesn't exist, just that I've been lucky / fortunate enough not to have experienced it.
In my experience attitude and connections count for the most. I'm 45 and I don't have any problems finding new opportunities. But I never go through the front door, it's always a referral. I can't imagine having a real problem until I'm in my 60s. At least around here, there just aren't so many programmers that we can afford to turn away qualified people just because they are in their 40s or 50s. If they know their shit, they're welcome to work for us. We've got developers ranging from 20-65, pretty evenly distributed.
It's already a trend. The fault, IMHO, lies with browser vendors making it possible for sites to detect private browsing mode in the first place. That should be a privacy but and prioritized accordingly.
The PiHole I use at home renders a lot of media sites unavailable to me. I'm not going to subscribe to all of them, so it will effectively reduce my bubble to whatever I'm willing to pay for (and I'll tell you know, that will basically be whatever I can get from a single all-you-can-eat provider, like Apple News).
I'm sure the actions of a person who would buy and set up a specialized device to block ads are not representative of the general population so I (and probably any other content producer) are not going to optimize for that use-case, though I do appreciate your sharing.
It may be that "regular" people are more willing to have a dozen different media subscriptions for various sites, but I don't think that's a safe assumption.
Incognito can be detected by via javascript looking at how the browser behaves differently in incognito.
It looks like some of these detection mechanisms go away as Chrome gets updated but like seo, spam, viruses, and other such problems etc. there is a war aspect between trying to exploit and avoid exploiting.
I don't see how it'd be difficult to just obfuscate this. If it tries to write a cookie then let it write a cookie, just clear it on the next page reload. I don't see how it should be able to distinguish between an incognito browser and a non-incognito browser that has no history and is navigating to the page in question for the first time.
I guess some things around local storage can be used to infer incognito mode, but I think it'd be straightforward to just write all local storage usage to memory instead of disk.
The stackoverflow link I included says that the FileSystem API is disabled in incognito mode so its absence suggests the user is connecting via an incognito tab.
Can someone tell me where the older software engineers in the Bay Area have gone? I recently moved into the software industry (after years in the telecom industry), and the lack of older software engineers is disconcerting in a Soylent Green type of way.
I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely to avoid companies where everyone's in their twenties and the offices looks like frat houses. But even so, I'd expect to see many more gray-haired engineers around here than I do.
Many of them are still there. It's important to highlight the fact that CS graduation rates have been increasing in popularity overall, so the age distribution is going to skew younger even absent any discrimination. There's oscillations but the overall trend is upward [1]. I've met plenty of developers in their 40s and a few in their 50s at "hip" companies in San Francisco.
Another factor is that high compensation means people can afford to retire earlier. I know a couple people that saved up a couple million, and then moved to "flyover" states with low CoL to live off passive income. It's often achievable by 40s or 50s depending on how much money is spent on kids. Especially if you have one or zero children it's within reach.
Someone who is over 40 today would have gotten their start in the late 90's around the time of the first Internet boom. The number of software engineering positions since then has exploded. Based on numbers on the Bureau of Labor and Statistics website it seems like they are roughly doubling each decade. The main source of new engineers is new graduates. That, coupled with the fact that people move into management, and leave the field, retire early is going to skew the workforce to the younger side regardless of any age discrimination.
I'm 44 and worked at various bay area startups you never heard of from 1998 to 2005, at which time I moved out of that area.
I don't have precise numbers, but based on a cursory scan of my linked-in connections, some of my cohort has followed that path and moved out. Another big subgroup is the people who went to google or some other Big N. In particular a lot of the high performance people did this.
Another person who replied to you suggested that CS/programming is just a lot more popular now and I think that is big part of the reason why it skews young. When I graduated (in 1997), CS was not a popular study. As a consequence, startups back then had a wide age range (20-60+), but still were quite youthful overall.
Yeah, I am in my mid 40s, and it was wild to interview for a new job after 5 years. Things have really changed in that short time.
I posted a portfolio that showed, if you want this, hire me! My resume was standard, listing out my projects and summarizing my experience.
I had good references that I rarely shared unless it was the last stages, so they wouldn't get bombarded. I applied weekly to new opps, keeping track for the inevitable unemployment record as well.
Results: My huge project list showed my age. Some companies clearly weren't interested... they wanted new programmers, younger, not stuck in the past, etc. I couldn't understand some companies purpose, so new agey with today's internet and reddit culture.
Still, I got 20–30 emails a day! Constant phone calls, messages, occasional scams. Did 2 in-person interviews. I found a great new job, remote programming, in 3-4 months! It was a blur!
The secret is respect, communication, wisdom and quick reflexes, in my case.
Or how about this. What software projects do you like to work on in your spare time? aah I don't.... Do you ask a postman if he likes to go on a long walk in his spare time?
when we has walks all the day long.
I recently applied for a job at digital ocean, and on the form they asked me how I like to be identified . You know, he , she, it, thing, alien, rubber ducky. I saw so no option for julius caesar.
It's interesting that corporate diversity reports provide population breakdowns for demographic categories involved in heated political debates but seldom (never, in my experience) provide breakdowns according to other categories that might be just as important for diversity of thought, e.g. age and political affiliation.
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[ 934 ms ] story [ 8735 ms ] threadYounger workers = less experience = lower pay.
Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.
At least that's what management often think.
The only name in this thread I recognise (although, to be fair, most people aren't using their real names), and as an aside, a name that a seventy-something year-old Vietnam veteran running an apartment full of automated test machines in Greater Tokyo was surprised I dropped when he told me that the Digital Mars compiler was testing well. That compiler was always well behaved. I wonder if his age would have been an impediment to finding work at in the US; in Tokyo he suffered only the problem of being a foreigner.
For many industries it's something other than opinion
and that's why i think your explanation is closer to the truth. higher salaries for older workers wouldn't matter. what does matter is that management thinks older workers will bring the wrong sauce to the product, exhibit reasonable skepticism of the (probably unsuccessful) product concept, generally fail to buy in to the vision and sass their 24 year old masters.
And, weather doesn’t adequately explain the high CoL anywhere outside California or Hawaii. “It’s where the jobs are, so everyone wants to be there does,” and it also explains California. (Hawaii is special— it’s an archipelago, so, cost of shipping goods plus weather is really the best explanation, given the lack of a compelling employment story.)
> Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.
If that's really the case then "age discrimination" doesn't necessarily indicate deliberately avoiding older workers to the sake of the fact that they're old. Say you have to fill a software developer role and the highest TC you can offer is $100k. Not unheard of for a company, say, one standard deviation below average. You interview a bunch of 40 year olds and 50 year olds and all of them have existing salaries way above that. What is the recruiter supposed to do, keep interviewing people that they almost certainly won't accept the offer? Ostensibly that' the law, but in reality anyone in that situation is going to shift their attention to people that would be willing to work for that kind of compensation.
This is partly what it's probably best to publish salary ranges as part of the job description, at least for companies other than top companies. The above scenario does mean that the minority of older devs that would accept that salary range get filtered out, and that's suboptimal.
You missed a step.
Older workers = more experience = more responsibility = higher pay.
Without that extra responsibility there's no reason to pay someone more simply because they're older. The pay should be based on what the job is, not the age or 'experience' of the person doing it.
"Old guy here is a low/mid level person after 20 years, so he clearly isn't a superstar. Young guy here is low/mid level person, so he has potential to be a superstar."
Hiring committees, smothered by the legal ass covering around race and sex discrimination, never even think twice about making this discriminatory argument. It's even officially enshrined in hiring plans as "expectation of trajectory", a rule that only applies to old people. And before you say "ok but that's a logical argument", it's exactly the same logically correct argument as the (illegal) "bases on my limited knowledge, a white/Chinese/male candidate I just met is more likely to be successful at this job than a black/Hispanic/female candidate".
Of course, by definition, most people aren't exceptional or even in the top 10% and our society unfairly (and unwisely) punishes them for getting older.
But it seems to be a rule of life.
Rich get richer. Top performers get more/better offers.
Poor get poorer. Non-top performers get less/worse offers.
I remember reading something where Paul Graham of Ycombinator said top performers never apply for jobs. They are often referred and handed jobs. And on the other side, you have ton of (supposedly) not so great workers who are sending out job applications by the dozens trying to get a job.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
>Whenever I hear "We need more programmers! Make more young people interested in programming! Teach programming at kindergarten!" I always get the urge to ask "What did you do with the old ones you had?"
>Where are all those programmers you hired 5-20 years ago? Why is no programmer at your company older than 40? Why do you have senior software engineers that are 25 years old? What did you do to all those people?
>If you can't take care of your employees, no wonder you never have enough.
older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no matter whether they liked coding or management more. the ones that failed in some way - meaning a disruption in their spending and earning capability - are the only ones on the market trying to get programming jobs, and complaining about it.
fixing the earning trajectory in a programming track helps fix this outcome too. FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.
The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.
Can confirm: Once you "plateau" in a division, the only options are lateralling to a technology you don't know (with the same expectations exacted upon you) or simply going management and that assumes that there's room in management.
Given how frequently "organisational shifts/changes" occur, that could leave you out in the cold, just as well.
or they fall for the money-making scam, where their new car payment is now the same amount as their rent originally was when they began their careers. Buying larger houses, etc. Basically always barely acclimating to their new level of wealth, so that they always try to climb up the next rung.
I recently quit a job that was advertised as a developer but turned into 90% paperwork. Lasted over a year (it was contractor anyway). But in hindsight, basically NO amount of money would make me happy or willing to fill out forms all day. Seriously, even another $100k wouldn't make me feel any better, I'd still be miserable and not doing what I love.
This just implies they like keeping their career trajectory more than coding.
did I really need to spell that out? I know some people can't relate, but its not clear to me how much they can't relate
If your spouse is making even $50K that puts you in the top decile.
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
You don’t need to move into middle management to comfortable support a family.
Non-optimal.
Gotta make more, gotta save more, gotta send your children to better school.
And thats just the baseline.
How do you think the other 80% of households survive that aren’t making the $130K that an average developer can make in any large city or if you’re a dual income earner with your spouse making about the average of a college educated worker of $50K - how do you think the other 90% of households make it?
But then again, I am also of the opinion that the school you go to doesn’t have as much bearing on your later success in life - as long as it safe and teaching the basics - your home environment.
I look at the top 20 students who went to my (relatively poor performing school) and we were all teacher’s kids or doctor’s kids. There are two doctors, a few teachers, one professor at an Ivey league school, and a lawyer or two.
But my current job is also in the northern burbs where I live.
Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech.
So hack on the cool stuff at home. Treat your job as a job. There's no principal broken by going into management.
Like I said in another post, I just bought a 5 bedroom/3-1/2 bath house, 3000+ square foot house with a large office for $330K two years ago in the northern burbs of Atlanta where the school systems are ranked in the top 15% nationwide. It is the most affluent county in GA and one of the fastest growing in the nation. Three exits down the same size house is going for about $450K and you’re in one of the 10 most affluent cities in the nation -Johns Creek GA. (http://money.com/money/collection-post/4504851/richest-towns...)
Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech.
When I’m at home, I’m exercising, spending time with my wife and son, and just relaxing. If I can’t keep up with the latest tech at work, it’s time to change jobs.
Yes I will do work related side projects to learn a new to me technology, or proof of concepts with newer technology that aren’t on the critical path. I also work at small companies where I do get my hands dirty with everything from the front end to playing around with whatever I want to with a DEV AWS Account.
I don’t do “leading edge technology”. They are probably not widely marketable yet. I stay on the far end of “the slope of enlightenment” going to “Plateau of Productivity” of the Hype Cycle.
My resume is very buzzword compliant
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."
I've been consulting the last few months, mostly brought in to coach CTO's. I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers.
This leads to mismanagement, and nobody likes being mismanaged, (also it usually means you're being underpaid), so devs eventually wise up and get out. If you think about it, this is a natural extension of the "the best code is no code" ethos.
The best situations I've seen are programmers-managing-programmers. I've been lucky in my career to work for multiple "engineer-turned-founder" types, and these have felt the most "aligned."
I suspect that MBA programs should start including a CS component.
I've seen it in my own employment multiple times, my team's(admittedly good-hearted) managers come in and say "We'd like to do (list of 10 things). Now we know the software has limitations, and we don't have any money for feature enhancement, so feel free to tell us no on any of these."
Us: "We can do 2 of those, maybe three if you can give us a couple of days to hack in one of the simpler requests"
Managers: confused, questioning but begrudgingly accepting looks
That's because they don't. I've had good managers and bad ones, and all the good ones were, or had been, software engineers themselves. (Of course, some of the engineers were not so great as managers.) As I like to say, software engineering is about the management of complexity, and if you've never worked on a complex system, you don't understand how to do that.
I’m slowly getting more into the front end $cool_kids stack with React, etc.
But, I don’t do the blind resume submittals to job boards and applicant tracking systems. I keep a very strong network of external recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers.
I have never studied leetCode, and won’t go near a job that’s more concerned with how well I’ve read over “Cracking the Code” instead of how well I can architect a system.
My last job where I thought I was being hired as a senior developer I was asked “what was my 90 day plan to create a modern software department to create two green field projects”. It ended up they were looking for a dev lead.
The next job interview I spent most of my time white boarding architecture. I wasn’t asked a single development question. I just explained what I did on my last job.
As far as comp, if I were in a position to travel a lot, there are plenty of consulting companies willing to pay me more than I am making now - all I would have to do is send out a few emails to my network. Again not bragging. After working 20+ years if you can’t get some type of consulting gig you’re doing it wrong.
I’m not really architect / principal level just yet (probably 3-5 years of continuous improvement from that I would say), but I feel like I’m just barely getting ahead as a senior making $200k paying $2300/month in rent with no hope to buy and about a 40-60 minute commute (depending on whether I drive to BART or walk). Just wondering if there’s something better out there.
My commute is 30-40 minutes depending on traffic and we just bought a 3000 square foot 5 bedroom/3.5 bath house + a large office, new build in a great school system for $335K with 5% down. Our mortgage all in is a little less than $2100/month.
The most senior hands on developers/individual contributors/team leads can make between $130K-$160K. Even with that, it leaves more than enough to max out a 401K, and have enough fun money to do most of the things we want.
But like I said, just from talking to hiring managers over “informal lunches”, there are positions for overpriced “digital transformation consultants”, “enterprise architects”, etc. where you can get $200K and live in a lower cost of living area as long as you live near a major airport.
Without knowing regional pricing information it's hard to say they "should be able to save enough to buy something at some point".
If he is only paying 2300 rent he is living in a small apt even 60 minutes out. The cost of everything in the bay makes you wonder where money goes.
Lunch is a minimum of 25 bucks, bottle of cheap beer 10.
So your rent plus debt servicing should be around $4000... leaving your around $4000 a month for everything else. You should be able to live pretty well on that! That is more than most people make total.
Don't we all.
> Food, utilities, insurance, car expenses (I don’t drive much, but it’s fairly essential for me to have a car to get certain places; it’s also paid off, fortunately)
We all also pay for this.
> probably $2000-2500/month
Dude you still have $1000 probably free just chilling if you are strict.
I don't get this, "you are not where you should be" mindset.
The student debt sucks, but you are doing extremely, extremely well. Making more than some doctors.
As for “doctor money”, according to https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2018-compensation-overvie... I make below the average salary for every physician specialty except public health & preventative medicine, and I’m several years older than the typical newly minted physician.
I also live in an area where you need to make at least $80k or so to qualify for a 1br apartment, according to the “3x rent in gross salary” rule used by a lot of landlords. With my large, fixed expenses (student loans), I’m not convinced moving to a lower CoL area actually improves my bottom line, either.
I’m not poor, and, like I said, I’m getting ahead slowly now, but I’m by no means rolling in it.
You could say my career trajectory is behind being in my 40s and still being an individual contributor, but I don’t see any scenario where I would have wanted to be a person manager. (Been there done that. Went screaming back to an IC role).
But, I do see a narrow path where I can retire at the standard retirement age and be okay with a paid off house, enough savings to be okay, and hopefully social security between me and my wife collecting half of mine instead of her own.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20134638
Based on the comments in this thread, I'm guessing leetcode has done some successful marketing in the valley. I'm an East coaster.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see if your company is solving hard problems (tm) or problems at a scale that has never been done before why you need smart people (tm). But I find it ridiculous that some companies care about how well you can do esoteric algorithms when they are hiring you to do yet another software as a service CRUD app or some internal bespoke app that will never see the light of day outside of the company.
I’m not even convinced knowing hard computer science is important in most jobs. One of the best developers I know graduated from a well known but not well regarded private for profit college. Didn’t know much hard computer science but he reads like crazy about best practices when it comes to writing software. His code and unit tests are things of beauty to maintain. We worked together at three separate jobs. He’s also in his mid 40s and he codes on his own time and does side projects like someone in their 20s.
I got my start doing assembly in the 80s as a teenager, bit twiddling C on x86 PCs and mainframes for a decade, but none of that matters when I am spending half my day as a “full stack developer” and the other half as the de facto “AWS Architect” (in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king).
I am 33.5, and looking for a job in India. I absolutely abhor doing leetCode, but atleast here it seems to be the only way - even within my own connected network.
They don't seem to have the same age bias as these startupy nodejs/react firms, and they pay just as well.
I've always been a strong believer in being a generalist - at least in my experience, the best developers and architects have some knowledge of networking, Windows, Linux, security etc. Basically, they know enough that they can quickly get to grips with almost anything that's thrown at them.
Job ads address people more likely to be a good fit. That's it.
Like the other posters are saying, the real problem is that learning how to develop good software (or any other technical product) takes time. This is an experience-based subject - art? craft? - and while I have seen many very talented younger engineers and developers, their lack of experience with a whole list of factors that don't involve slapping some code into an IDE, or what have you, usually means they end up being far less productive than people like to assume.
Bay Area culture has produced a lot of great things, but this stereotype has got to go.
Buzzword compliance is another set of filters.
Even being unemployed is used against you. Gaps between periods of employment are seen by some interviewers as evidence of possible prison time.
These same organizations then complain about not being able to find candidates for various positions.
I'd love to consult one day, but I haven't cracked that code. I have 18 years of systems automation, operations, and now management experience.
Something isn't good enough.
I think you either don't have the right track record, or you're selling yourself incorrectly, by which I mean you're charging too little. Whiteboard interviews are out of the question as a contractor: I simply don't have time for this circus. One thing that helps with such things is pricing your services right. And that means charging more than you think is reasonable. The more you can charge, ironically, the easier these discussions get. The effect compounds further if you have several satisfied former clients who can give references.
My selling point is really simple, too: you've tried and you've failed, now let me show you what's possible.
Finding clients outside of that requires what I expect is a social media presence, possibly publications and talks. None of which I've undertaken.
No one trusts the "resume/CV" track record, not in contracting and not in full-time roles. It's either word-of-mouth or some other method of trust, if it isn't a set of interviews.
I've picked up a decent full-time role to refurnish my image, as running an infrastructure with staff, you'd expect, should be impressive.
I'm skeptical of the contract market.
And to go back to the original thread, I found myself getting spurned due to age for any role which wasn't technical/managerial in the world of full-time work once I went back to it.
> If you hire a young person they might be 100x or 10x or 1x in a couple years.
100x?
I'm jealous of whatever drugs are available in Silicon Valley, because even 10X sounds fantastical to me.
Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.
To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.
And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.
I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.
As an aside, ultimate responsibility for IBM's corporate websites does not _sound_ very similar to the CTO role at a tech company.
Appreciate that it's not similar to today's concept of CTO. I was not only responsible for all IBM web sites, I was expected to design, develop, deploy, manage, diagnose software for all IBM web sites, even those that I had no direct control over. IBM’s own software products tended to trail what we were doing in production by 12-24 months, when they were actually released.
It was a fun job, until it wasn't.
7x24x52 or 24x365
;^)
Nothing to do whatsoever with CTO. It's not event relevant to anything executive or management.
I hope that you can describe your position in a more positive light than this text and without alluding to being CTO, because both will get you rejected fairly quickly in any interview.
SaaS?
Would love to work again in tech but have never cracked getting on recruiters’ radar and I have better things to do than play whack—a-mole with the latest and greatest in applicant tracking systems automated decision algorithms.
How are you supposed to find out the hiring manager's name from a job post? I'd be curious to hear some of these tricks.
Go to meetups. User's groups. Any gathering of technical people. Important people tend to network, but they may not be the "regulars" as they are busy people.
I know more than a couple of technical/user groups where a relatively unknown person giving a good presentation is likely to wind up with an interview on the spot ... if not an actual consulting/job offer.
The key is a good presentation. The content shows your technical chops and the presentation shows your communication skills.
And, while lots of people say "have a GitHub and reference it", I'm going to caution about this. Just like an art portfolio, only put things you can proud of in there if you're going to make it public and reference it for employment. I may make you show me at the interview on your laptop and talk about it and it shouldn't embarrass you.
(Personally, I don't check GitHub unless someone points me at it explicitly.)
Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`.
Equally in my early years pre PC mainstream days, there was an age bias towards older people. With many personal experiences upon that in that time/culture - including, believe it or not `overqualified` (they sat a coding exam and I found mistakes in the exam) for a COBOL job at a bank aged 19 (had 3 years work under my belt already in the field). Recruitment agent said it was because I knew more than the boss and he didn't like that. Was a time also back then when the boss would of previously done the job of those under him in such institutional culture of that time.
Dare say starting out today is easier than it was pre internet boom.
I'm sure there are others who equally have experienced agisim on both ends of the scale in IT.
Supposedly both demo groups strongly prefer their own. Whereas us x'ers were so few, we just had to get along with everyone.
I really wished the response of "over qualified" was made illegal as we all know it is used as a way to say no for reasons that are not legal...like age discrimination etc or other forms of discrimination (note I'm autistic spectrum).
Oh well, I've grown to loath and borderline hate HR departments over the decades thru such experiences. Which have been predominantly staffed by females, not that I'm drawing any conclusion to that, but it has been solid observation over my entire working career and at the very least, curious. Maybe there needs to be a drive for sexual equality with HR departments :/
My completely unscientific gut feeling was that it was the easiest to get started in tech in the late 90s & right as the industry started recovering from the .com bust (~2005, when I got my first "real" full-time developer job).
The funny things is that they were already teaching programming in secondary schools when I was a kid (i.e. it wasn't really 'exotic' to be a programmer) but even in my most recent job most programmers are in their 20s.
I was taught programming in school (well, actually self taught from magazines like Byte, computer World and Unix World and a ZX81) in the early 80's, was an acoustic coupler modem that took 30 mins to get a stable line to a mainframe at some college our school had some airtime upon. Today, far more accessible, but back then, was hard on many levels.
Biggest hurdle was HR and one role I went for (was 20 then), had two interviews, HR and then the tech people. Litterly had HR peon say to me "That's a lot of money for somebody your age" and really was a very uncomfortable attitude. Blow the tech interview out of the water, got offered the job and more money than the HR peon bismershed for somebody my age and turned the job down flat solely due to the attitude of the HR peon and made that very clear. Took another job offer, for less money outer principle. Though turned out to be a better job. But had I not had the attitude from HR, I'd of taken that job.
Lot changed in that 15 year gap between mid-30's aged people and people in their 50's today. But then much has changed on many levels and I'd say for the better overall, albeit the age discrimination thing still exists, they just moved the goalposts.
But IT is still a young industry, compare to say accountants. But then accountant qualification from a decade ago, still worth it's value today, not many tech certs/qualifications that you can say that about as the industry changes and is still evolving. That is kinda the crux and what makes IT as an industry, hard to compare to many other industries as IT is just more dynamic.
That said - COBOL has remained pretty darn static. But I moved out of that area decades ago (before you the internet boom and the time you got into tech).
But tech is a constant learning curve, that won't change soon either. Hence any job in tech is not just the job, but a full time education on top of that to stay current.
Ease of access to consumers with the likes of ebay or app stores and lower running costs into breaking into those avenues have opened up many an avenue that was harder to access before.
But that is progress, come 50+, you may end up having the same perspective in relation to when you started out and starting out today.
I applied for a helpdesk position like this, once. Was required to take an IQ test and one of the questions during the interview was about what IRQ the keyboard was assigned to (you know, in the plug-n-play era, when IRQ and COM ports no longer were a "thing" to configure).
Got a response back, later, that I was overqualified.
I easily translated it to, "Wasn't willing to put up with our shit for so little pay."
Bullet dodged but there are some truly caustic employers out there, who will try to gatekeep every possible variance that they can think of, to keep the line toed[0].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
Everyone should read Traction by Garbriel Weinberg. It's for startup marketing but job searching is basically marketing yourself in a world that has one dominant channel (recruiters). The efficacy of different channels is time varying as they get saturated- You have to find the one that works for you at any given time
Thankfully my mom makes enough for things to work out, and they own a piece of rental property, and my dad stashed away a lot of money for retirement while he worked (to the dismay of my mother).
Additionally, the company I work at is half (or more) people hired straight out of college which kinda makes me feel weird. It's a small company that has been around ~15 years or so, and I feel like their hiring practices would lead to their ass getting handed to them in court.
I like the people I work with, but something definitely feels wrong.
Almost all of the US economy is a monopoly or cartel dominated by 1-3 corporations per segment.
If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get rid of.
I still think we should have protected classes, but the protection needs to reach into hiring too. Maybe make companies have to submit written justification for not hiring someone in a protected class? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.
Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a protected class, that's a subtly different argument....
Hiring needs to be less regulated, not more so
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept
> The Hartz concept, also known as Hartz reforms or the Hartz plan, is a set of recommendations submitted by a committee on reforms to the German labour market in 2002. Named after the head of the committee, Peter Hartz, these recommendations went on to become part of the German government's Agenda 2010 series of reforms, known as Hartz I – Hartz IV. The committee devised thirteen "innovation modules", which recommended changes to the German labour market system. These were then gradually put into practice: The measures of Hartz I – III were undertaken between January 1, 2003, and 2004, while Hartz IV was implemented on January 1, 2005.
Ireland: 5.4% UK: 3.8% Germany: 3.1% Portugal: 6.3% Poland: 3.5% Czech: 1.9% Sweden: 6.2% Finland: 6.7%
That about ~230mil people. Mate what are you talking about.
Try France: 8.7%, was 10% as recently as 2015. Italy: 10.2%
Of course, unemployment is much worse for young workers in these countries. If you can't fire anyone then hiring is risky, so jobs tend to end up taken by older workers who then "camp" in the jobs even if they suck. Reverse ageism at work!
I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped.
This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on my butt, do what I love, and I get paid really well to do it. If interviewing is extremely hard and I have to study, yet again, at 48 so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who are so less fortunate than I am.
[Edit] s/250 Leetcode/250 Leetcode problems/
Not to mention the fact that I will spend the next two year learning front end frameworks and Docker ecosystem. I’m 45
That said, it sounds like you and I are both "cultivating" and "tending to" our profession. I think that's what it takes to stay competitive and have longevity imo.
I got into vicious codependent cycle with my job by the time I was 35. I didn’t know enough to be competitive and leave, I was bitter about my pay and they just kept me around because I knew where the bodies were buried. Since then, it’s all about optionality. If I go more than a month not enjoying my environment it’s time to leave.
Considering swinging the pendulum the other way to hands on technical again and let others do the BS work. Do you know anything about the north Atlanta market? Companies, salary range, culture? Or maybe ones to avoid...Thanks!
With today’s data privacy concerns and tough European regulations I don’t think this attitude is acceptable.
I hope the field makes a return to appreciating fundamentals.
That being said, I was on the hiring committee at my last job and personally, I found the best way to hire engineers is to just chat with them about previous projects. I'd usually run through one or two, "just confirming you can code" whiteboard questions and then ask them to tell me about a project they are proud of that they had a large part in. If you ask questions that dig into the project ("How did you do X?", "Why did you do Y?", "Now that it's over, what would you change?") you can usually get a pretty good idea of their skill level and knowledge as a developer as well as some great insights into their personality.
Obviously, that's much harder to scale and more subject to bias, but it worked for me.
Short of industry wide collaboration with some kind of longitudinal study, getting an idea of what does and doesn't work in terms of false negatives is nearly impossible.
1. are my false positives low?
2. is the time it takes to fill a position low?
If the answer to both of those questions is "yes" then the system is great for me (and I've seen the system described above provide affirmative answers to both these questions in a startup setting).
Determining whether a hiring system is locally good is significantly easier than determining if it's good in general.
The problem is that you don't know the cost of the false negatives; you don't know whether the people you didn't hire would have greatly improved your processes / code / business
It’s probably not the stuff you know how to do that makes or breaks your company. Either someone else does it, or you “figure it out” and hopefully you know if you did it right before it’s too late.
How do you hire someone to be good at stuff you aren’t already good at? There’s gonna be a lot of those in the false negatives pile.
Realistically if a dev gets a leetcode interview they don't want to do, most of them can just cancel and likely get an interview with someone else next week if they're actively applying to jobs.
To that end, I'm 43 and last on the market a few months back, accepted an offer within a week of looking, had 3 pending final/onsites (including Amazon Seattle) and at least another half dozen in earlier stages that I shut down.
I do nothing to hide my age on my resume. Since turning 40 I've been on the market 3 times now, each time interviewing w/ 10-20 companies, and only once did I get the sense that agism was at play.
Part of the reason is because I hadn't spent as much effort on this earlier in my career; now with the concern of agism, every time I'm on the market I try to level up my skillset.
- Whenever I need to hop into a code share w/ a co-worker (I'm remote FWIW) the ability to quickly suss out an idea has greatly improved from having a decent aptitude with those types of exercises.
- Any non-trivial PR usually has at least a few portions that could be extricated to challenges like these. Being able to slice through issues like these in 15-30 minutes vs. say hours helps w/ my cadence. It lets me focus on the issues that are unique to the business.
The 30 minute pairing challenge we give during our interview (which I took myself) was something that was pulled and simplified from our source. I ended up having to implement something very similar just weeks after I started.
Of course being good are things like this isn't necessary to being an effective sr. developer, nor is it sufficient (even for an entry-level). But I do very much see it as a skill that is helpful and worth getting good at.
Better outcomes, better industry productivity, sure. But ‘hiring fairness’?
The (open) question is, can we do better?
But, why did we get through? Maybe the process really is capable of separating wheat from the chaff. Maybe the process works 85% of the time, and the 1 time it didn’t work in recent memory is someone who has already left the company. Maybe only capable people self select into the process for some reason. Maybe we’ve been phenomenally lucky.
The point is, just because a filter allows the right people through doesn’t mean it’s necessarily any good.
I define “good” and “right people” to be that which produces efficiency, quality, innovation in the business. So a good filter to me is good wrt these outcomes.
The industry is starving for ‘good people’ and ‘good outcomes’ and we should work to optimize this imo.
Any other measure divorced from outcome to me seems... weird.
Triplebyte claims the industry average onsite pass rate is in the neighborhood of 30% (https://triplebyte.com/blog/12-000-engineers-evaluated). I suspect that the huge majority of those who fail onsites get jobs. Is that efficient?
What I’m saying is that the notion of ‘fairness’ should have little relevance to improving this side of things.
I don't feel comfortable saying here, but the Blind app is an excellent resource for finding what total compensation (TC) you can expect for different companies and years of experience (YOE).
That said, there are plenty of resources that have been helpful to me:
1) http://highscalability.com/
2) http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032175.do
3) https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
Hope this helps!
Mid 40s myself, stayed in one tech stack for too long but have been redeeming myself in the past few years with .net core, AWS, Docker and trying to get into React.
I find myself struggling most with the front end bits, but it's just a question of staying with it.
Have always loved tech, and highly passionate about it. Having a family with a kid on the ASD has really restricted available hours to tinker though, that's my main challenge.
Anyway I found what you and others here wrote quite motivational, so thanks again.
One thing that I'd like to mention that I didn't before is that the interview process can be taxing, draining, and it can be an emotional roller-coaster. Try to stay positive and keep at it. Good things will come!
And yes can confirm that when I had to go through the process, and was less prepared, it was certainly very draining. So spending time learning/staying on top of things in peace time will certainly help during "war". :)
Staying physically healthy, lifting weights etc is another thing that hasn't been raised so far, so would just like to put that in. Can always adjust perception through that, and also it is something we truly need to be doing now that we're getting older. It also helps for mental health.
The part that is missing from nearly all interviews are an opportunity for the company to sell itself to the interviewee. So as the interviewee, I'd like to say that if you make me jump thru some hoops because you feel like I should go through the same hazing process you went thru when interviewing, I am going to think that you are only focused on what I can do for you.
How about this, as an interviewer, say something like... "This design question is gonna suck because I don't know how to ask it better, but if you can just hang in there long enough to help me understand you can think about something non-trivial, that'd be fabulous. We both know you're smart, and I just need to imagine working with you in something complex."
My last three jobs I was hired as the “adult supervision” as either an individual contributor who was more equal than others or as an official dev lead. I was specifically asked by the director those types of questions and how would I rewrite a 20 year old PowerBuilder app that had been maintained by two “developers” who had been their for 20 and 13 years.
I went through the training process they would go through, setting up source control, setting up development, QA environments, automated testing, and CI/CD.
Then he was shocked when I said that I wouldn’t rewrite it from the ground up. I would upgrade to a newer version of PowerBuilder that supported COM, concert the whole app to a COM object, put a C#/WebAPI wrapper around it, write some automated integration reads and contract out some front end developers to put a web interface on it.
Then slowly move the PB logic to C# and keep the stored procedures after upgrading to the latest version of sql server.
Finally move the stored procs to code.
All this to say, that’s what’s wrong with some “senior developers”. They’ve spent their entire career at large companies where they haven’t had a chance to work up and down the entire stack. If you spent your entire career “coding” at a large company, you’re not that much more valuable to most companies than someone with 5 years of experience b
At that job we had to hire some overpriced/clueless “AWS consultants” since I didn’t know AWS at the time. Now I could manage that. I still wouldn’t try doing anything on the front end. There are people much better than me.
So, trust me when I say I don't object in the slightest to being asked to study and learn things. LeetCode-style problems look like one form of recreation to me.
And yet, I still think this comment is shortsighted because:
* I'd guess a lot of what's on LeetCode isn't exactly untrodden territory for any developer that got their start before 1995.
* Distinguishing oneself can work in the individual case, but it generalizes poorly. Imagine employers and would-be job-seekers alike internalize LeetCode knowledge as a standard distinguishing mark. Like college degrees, distinguishing points often over time become standard expectations. The likely outcome is that about as many devs in their 20s & 30s can brandish the same "distinction" that devs 40+ can and the incentives to prefer youth perform about the same.
Individual efforts to improve ones lot are a good place to start, but they rarely solve systemic problems.
Most developers are doing CRUD apps or at most apps where the complexity is in the business rules and process.
But why is there this assumption that if someone studies Leetcode and algorithms then it means that they can't do anything else? Why is there this all or nothing mentality?
If someone studies Leetcode and algorithms, wouldn't one assume they know other things as well in the software engineering realm? I have plenty of friends in the Bay Area who are thriving at FAANG who studied algorithms and Leetcode intensely.
If they were told a web page was slow would they know enough architecturally to know how to find the bottleneck and no the solution for solving it? No the answer is not based on finding the o(n) complexity of reversing a binary tree.
Of course not, the main purpose of the leetcode is to ace the interview.
Doesn't mean they do not know any of those questions you mentioned above.
I, for example, did all you mentioned above and also practicing leetcode.
And I've seen developers come from doing Node green field APIs at Netflix to waist deep in a 15 year old Java application with Spring MVC and some underlying Struts yet to be removed and don't understand why debugger stopped going any deeper and they lost where they start 10 classes ago from shared modules.
Then they don't understand how refactoring a core message for alerting customer across the sight has tight coupling, wanted to something fancy and broke the key business features, try to argue it's better but a business unit just list functionality of it's product. Instead of researching, and coming up a plan with a team to refactor using TTD and Strangle Vine method from the legacy tightly coupled code, to a separate module with better testing and following SOLID principles.
Welcome to multiple Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely. Unless you're working on a greenfield project or refactoring code for extreme performance, understanding the operational side of the business will get you more points towards the mythical 10x programmer status than algorithms.
I can't count the times I've seen scope creep and deadline slippage because the developer didn't really understand the need & use case and built something other than what was required.
I am having very difficult time getting the offers (duh, when performing like this). Did you always get to receiving offers? I seem to always get the, we decided to go with another candidate... line after my onsite.
I've only had 2 company's fly me out so far and the only companies that I have gotten offers at don't do LeetCode. It's extremely frustrating or maybe I'm just not prepared well enough yet and need to be more consistent with my study and practice (and don't pay as much either) or maybe I'm just not smart enough. I feel stuck.
Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity.
This happens to me too.
> Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity.
Dude just try for companies on the west coast. Why is this the end all be all? Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Charlotte, Raleigh, Colorado Springs. . . So many cities with low CoL and six figure salaries for Developers, Security Engineers, Linux Admins, Infrastructure Engineers.
You even have Denver, DC, NYC, Charlotte, Arlington, Seattle, Tampa, Minneapolis, so many options. Stop limiting yourself San Francisco when there are so many great cities, with awesome opportunities.
That said, doubling my salary a Big-N for a few years and getting experience at a larger tech company is what I'm mostly chasing at the moment. I want the experience, I want to see what it's like for myself. I can just rent out the condo I have now easily, pack a bag of clothes and go.
Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic.
When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing teams. There must be something wrong with you, so I cannot pass your papers to the client."
Still, looking for a job is a very traumatic experience. The companies are looking for unicorns: young, cheap, without family (aka drinking in evenings, working on weekends), with lots of experience, and academic knowledge (which will never be used).
A couple of times I heard from guys, who would be my managers "oh, I'd love to have your experience"... the rest of the interviews went smoothly. In all the places I even didn't get to the step where they asked for the money requirements. They just didn't answer.
I'm looking for a remote job now. I even made a nicely stripped resume on one page. My normal has 3 pages. It's a very traumatic experience, especially that most of the remote companies require knowing almost only some new stuff, totally ignoring my 18 years of experience in everything else.
Btw... a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough to make surgeries on his/her own. A programmer of my age is usually a useless resource, which is happily replaced with someone just after the college.
All this makes me sad. The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years.
In fact, I negotiated not to be a team lead at my current job.
I got the job. But, when I interview there are certain things I want to emphasize and that wasn’t one of them.
This is very culture specific.
Example: Like you, I usually keep a revolving ~10 years history on my CV. As the years progress, I drop anything > 10 years, as it's really no longer relevant.
Anyways, I was pointedly asked one time during an interview, recently, for a company in a different country, "Where's the rest of your work history since university?"
That was almost 20 years ago, now. You have any idea just how long my CV would be, now, with all of that information?
/tableflip.gif
And then just carry a copy or two of the full CV with you to the interview. If someone wants to see it, let them. Generally interviewers have just been curious.
So they are 23 year olds write lots of managing experience? Sometimes I just dislike this industry with its title inflation. I am 33 having been a recruiter for a short stint, I can tell you most of them just checkbox candidates because they have no idea what they are hiring. As they say, no one ever got fired buying an ibm.
Back when I hired into my company in ‘96 (I’m 47 now and 23 years at the same place), all the managers were in their 50’s and 60’s, who had done real engineering.
Then they become younger and younger, and eventually my manager was an idiot in his late 20’s whose relevant technical experience was “designing a power supply for an FPGA”, with me in my 40’s and an expert in my field. I told them I was leaving, so they gave me a promotion, and now I report to a 50 something female. She is a good manager.
Fortunately I’m at they point now where I’m the graybeard in the basement who gets to solve all the hard problems.
No one ever got fired going Big Blue...
I know a director or two lol.
Forget surgeons. My dentist is nearing retirement age and a younger dentist was brought in to be groomed to replace him. The youngish dentist on more than a few occasions mentioned he couldn't/wouldn't do certain procedures because one with more experience was necessary.
The 'young' dentist is no more than 30 years old. And in coding world, if you are over 30, you are considered over the hill.
> The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
What is valued is someone who can get productive with new trendy framework right away, while receiving minimal pay.
Pure hyperbole.
This is a hard requirement to meet because as you go up the hierarchy of positions, the first level leader initially knows more than the junior contributors, but that pretty rapidly flips. Maybe the second level of leadership still knows more than the first, but almost never after that. How could someone be an expert practitioner in all the varied disciplines that they likely oversee? It skews towards general tech leadership quite quickly.
Experience in software development is sadly irrelevant for much of the software development industry. Instead what is today valued is knowledge of some new framework, the ability to describe data structures and algorithms (for interviews only), and the ability to pick-up (hack) at things quickly and without complaint.
All of these things are equally well done by a newcomer, of which there are ever increasing numbers. What future does someone increasingly older have over time, in an industry where the only qualifications (really) sought are "smart, eager, compliant, cheerful, and quick to learn"?
Analytical skills can be tested. It gets much harder on the creative skill and interaction skill side. Software is mostly about people communicating and making decisions. These standardized tests are only good to get accurate results in an area not so relevant later.
I’m not saying that it’s not a real phenomenon, but pretty much all the evidence I’ve seen is anecdotal or fairly weak.
While it’s true that a lot of older people are great programmers, I also think programming ability is only about 50% of what most people are looking for. The other 50% is about how well you work with others, and I have to say, when I read a lot of these anecdotes I can’t help but feel like some of people these people aren’t getting hired because they come off as stubborn assholes.
Also, studies on this issue tend to not be well known without effort looking them up. The asshole factor is relevant but not as much as you would expect.
The actual perception that older workers haven't kept their edge is actually a common bias I've seen while gathering people for hiring. This bias is probably common amongst younger looking at older workers (eg 25 year old not hiring 35 year old) but also amongst older looking at less older. Eg a 50 year old won't hire a 40 year old because they wonder why the 40 year old even wants the position. Those two viewpoints seem to be recurring patterns at least in my experience.
You probably want hard data. I'm sure it is out here, Department of labor?
And the article isn't even about Software Devs.
EDIT: evidence of this in this thread said by others:
"Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism."
"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."
maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more clues?
> he sells air-conditioning now.
probably makes more (and accomplishes more) than many engineers, especially ones at vapor-ware startups.
Nah, I think management is just a job that requires experience and certification like any other job to be truly good at. People have this idea that "it's management, how hard can it be"... Turns out, really hard.
Only the qualified should be managers, not some 20 year old whose only qualification is being 'good with people'.
For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable?
Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x markup for it or something?
If there's a large pool of super skilled people begging for work I don't quite understand why someone wouldn't want to leverage that. I get why maybe you pay older workers less if you discriminate, but to not hire them at all seems strange.
On one cost issue. Let's say you're in a city other than SEA, LA, SF, NYC and Boston. A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year old. The cost of a 45 year old employee further increases with time due to that (over 10 years, from 45 to 55, an employee's health benefits cost can easily climb by an additional $5k-$6k per year). So if the salary in question is $90,000 (again, outside the elite tech cities), that bumps the cost of the employee considerably as they age. Some states - such as NY - have laws that alter this equation though. When an employee goes from eg 20 to 35 years old, there's a far more modest healthcare benefits cost increase (30%-40% increase would be more typical, starting from a lower base cost versus the 45 year old; from 40 to 55 the cost can easily double, from a higher starting point).
This is another serious issue that people frequently run into with the US healthcare system.
Jesus freaking christ I never realised that being European. This is a game changer for older folks, I guess I'm out of luck if I ever want to move to the US and I'm already over 30, ha :/
If you're making eg $150,000 or $200,000 in SF or NYC and working for a stable company, an additional $500-$600 per month for the company isn't nearly the concern versus if you're working in Cleveland earning $75,000.
If you're with a decent company with good benefits, it's also not an unusual situation more generally speaking. Half the country receives its healthcare benefits from an employer. Companies in the US are used to forking over very high costs for healthcare benefits. It's an accepted cost of employing people here. Being unemployed at 55 in the US, with weak savings (can't bridge yourself to the next job) and struggling job prospects, is a very serious problem however. That's the sort of situation you want to avoid in the US.
If you're self-employed the healthcare costs can be a real killer also, obviously unless you earn enough to offset it properly. As a very young entrepreneur I simply went without healthcare coverage. I was fortunate to not have any meaningful health problems in those years, it's blatantly a serious risk to take.
This sucks, but it definitely explains a lot of discrimination at the higher-end of the scale. The OP has a 71-year-old who couldn't find work. It must be very difficult for an employer to agree to hire this person, get them trained up on their specific business processes, only for them to have a serious health issue (and/or die) inside of a year. I get that this can happen to anyone, but the likelihood is of course greater the older you get. Maybe employers could take out some kind of insurance on their employees, with the cost based on the actuarial tables and taken out of the employees' salaries (kind of what you suggest).
My experience suggests that a fair chunk of the population of software developers are incapable of sustainably creating positive business value overall (even if they were paid nothing). If that model is the correct one, part of what you're paying for in a younger applicant is they might be good, whereas with an experienced yet unskilled applicant, they might already be the equivalent of a scratched-off lottery ticket that isn't a winner. (There's no price at which you would buy it.)
Note that I'm well into the age range where I would be discriminated against if age discrimination were rampant. I'm also not claiming that experienced workers are more likely than younger workers to have a negative value. I'm merely claiming that their value is more likely to be determined and less likely to change in the future.
I’ve not found age to be a good proxy for capacity or capability; I know exceptionally good (and many poor) coders at every age range I’ve seen in our field.
As for “looking for a job”, that’s a normal thing. Most experienced candidates will have a network to help, but moving to a new area or new field is also normal and hurts networking effectiveness.
This is the first time I'm seeing this message and I hope this doesn't become a trend.
No ads. No membership. Content for free. Doesn't work.
It looks like some of these detection mechanisms go away as Chrome gets updated but like seo, spam, viruses, and other such problems etc. there is a war aspect between trying to exploit and avoid exploiting.
Some details can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2909367/can-you-determin...
I guess some things around local storage can be used to infer incognito mode, but I think it'd be straightforward to just write all local storage usage to memory instead of disk.
I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely to avoid companies where everyone's in their twenties and the offices looks like frat houses. But even so, I'd expect to see many more gray-haired engineers around here than I do.
Another factor is that high compensation means people can afford to retire earlier. I know a couple people that saved up a couple million, and then moved to "flyover" states with low CoL to live off passive income. It's often achievable by 40s or 50s depending on how much money is spent on kids. Especially if you have one or zero children it's within reach.
1. https://i0.wp.com/d24fkeqntp1r7r.cloudfront.net/wp-content/u... (separate male/female isn't part of the point I'm trying to make, this is just the graph I had on hand)
I don't have precise numbers, but based on a cursory scan of my linked-in connections, some of my cohort has followed that path and moved out. Another big subgroup is the people who went to google or some other Big N. In particular a lot of the high performance people did this.
Another person who replied to you suggested that CS/programming is just a lot more popular now and I think that is big part of the reason why it skews young. When I graduated (in 1997), CS was not a popular study. As a consequence, startups back then had a wide age range (20-60+), but still were quite youthful overall.
I posted a portfolio that showed, if you want this, hire me! My resume was standard, listing out my projects and summarizing my experience.
I had good references that I rarely shared unless it was the last stages, so they wouldn't get bombarded. I applied weekly to new opps, keeping track for the inevitable unemployment record as well.
Results: My huge project list showed my age. Some companies clearly weren't interested... they wanted new programmers, younger, not stuck in the past, etc. I couldn't understand some companies purpose, so new agey with today's internet and reddit culture.
Still, I got 20–30 emails a day! Constant phone calls, messages, occasional scams. Did 2 in-person interviews. I found a great new job, remote programming, in 3-4 months! It was a blur!
The secret is respect, communication, wisdom and quick reflexes, in my case.
I recently applied for a job at digital ocean, and on the form they asked me how I like to be identified . You know, he , she, it, thing, alien, rubber ducky. I saw so no option for julius caesar.