I worked for a FAANG, and I thought ageism was a problem there -- I worried that I needed to be financially ready to retire at 50, because I might be unemployable there by then.
Now I'm at a younger company and you're seen as washed up at 35.
This is something that suddenly hit home during the pandemic when I read an article about people over 50 finding it easer to get jobs because interviews were remote.
I’m in my early 40s now but I’m forcing myself to think about what type of company and team I’d fit into in 10 years. I enjoy working at startups/scale ups. I’m the oldest person in the engineering team now (by over 10 years).
My concern is that even with the best of intentions by an interviewer not to discriminate on age, I worry that I’m going to have to end up at a multinational or consultancy in the future because hiring someone 50+ in a startup filled with 20-somethings would be chalked up as a “culture fit” issue.
Most new job opportunities as you grow senior come from your network, so if you have that the recruiter gate is automatically bypassed. People who know you, have worked with you - won't care about your age, only your contribution.
I'm the same age and being a late bloomer professionally I had some anxiety as well. In the end I mostly benefitted from not being treated as a junior, even if my CV is clearly light in the field.
I work at a very young company, both by age of the company and average age of employee, and I'm super happy that we also have 2 developers with more experience, their perspective on tech, business and life is different and just really valuable.
It is a deficit of some younger people that they don't value other perspectives, and I think points to a bad work environment.
You might find some 50+ software engineers embedded in industry verticals, usually moved their from other parts of the company after having proved adept at IT skills or cross-hired as seniors from the software consulting industry, usually skilled in a legacy tech the company uses (Cobol and RPG used to be the prime examples).
A medium to large software company never hires 45, a small software company almost never hires 35+.
As for the "bootcamp graduades", there is huge variance in the outcomes, but the median result is very disappointing.
I wonder how much of the median bootcamper is disappointing pattern is from a strong selection effect. Programming is interesting and easy for some and boring and hard for others. People for whom it’s easy are somewhat more likely to have found it via a non-bootcamp path.
If cooking suddenly became very lucrative and I went to a culinary bootcamp right now, I’d almost surely be a failure at a career change in that direction in large part because for 40+ years of being exposed to cooking, I showed no significant prior interest.
> Oddly enough the former chefs we work with are kicking butt - sample size is too small but maybe cooking is a great gateway to coding??
I spent about a year doing short order cooking to put myself through uni, nothing fancy, but I might offer some insight here. Cooking in busy service shifts might transfer well to coding because they demand retaining both a complex, large state in your head with minimal prompting, and update that state frequently with complex flows. Keeping hot food hot, cold food cold, hitting the order all at the same time, meeting the wait people at just the right time, for a baseline steady rate of never less than 5 orders deep simultaneously, peaking to 12-15, and handling emergencies on the fly (running out of sauce pans, spilled food, run out of ingredients, etc.), bears some abstract similarities to coding.
And they do it in uncomfortable, loud conditions, people shouting all the time, tempers flaring from time to time. 4-8 hours a day, five days a week, with few breaks. Think of it as they keep the equivalent of coders' flow state under what coders consider intolerable conditions. For a tiny fraction of the pay.
If you find a chef/cook who can run a crew of 6+ and pull their load as good as or better than any individual member of the crew, then they've got the raw chops to transfer that skill to keep pretty complex representations in their heads. The good ones I've seen intuitively use queuing theory without knowing it. The one caution I'd offer is watch for chronically short attention spans; there is a different kind of grinding in coding especially in debugging that rubs even many in this group the wrong way. Heck, too few coders have mastered that.
I'd like to hear others' experience with people or themselves who got into coding from a different field. My personal anecdata off the top of my head is I've seen a preponderance of military intelligence analysts, farmer/ranchers, and philosophers seem to do well coding.
I've recently taken a lesson from a sales team on root cause analysis. Developers are a head-strong bunch but they need to cross-pollinate way more often.
I find that strange because most sales people I know usually have underdeveloped root cause analysis capabilities and all of them work for big multinationals. From my understanding, their focus is elsewhere, e.g. in developing strong relationships with customers because that's ultimately what keeps them with the business. They don't sell the technology to an engineer but to an equally technically non-educated person so in the end, and most of the time, it seems like that technical advantage of your (TM) solution wouldn't be that important after all.
> I find that strange because most sales people I know usually have underdeveloped root cause analysis capabilities and all of them work for big multinationals.
It is uncommon. I've fallen in with a pretty good team. A few of them formerly worked for a big multinational.
I’ve been on a team with a mix of old fogeys (I was one of them) and much younger folks. It was great. The olds had been around the block enough times to know what problems to fix before they happened, and the youngs brought new ideas and new tech into the mix and pumped out a lot of code. Would definitely be on such a team again.
> I’ve been on a team with a mix of old fogeys (I was one of them) and much younger folks. It was great.
Diversity is undervalued in tech. Many companies have a hiring process that's like an assembly line, and it produces workers who are all the same, replaceable cogs. Managers tend to like this, in theory, but the workforce ends up being less than the sum of its parts, because the workers tend to all have the same biases, all the same weaknesses, all the same strengths, so the weaknesses are magnified, and the strengths have diminishing returns. What you want in a great team is individuals who have different, complementing strengths. And who can cover for each other's weaknesses, because they don't all have the same ones.
Hiring people with low fluid intelligence (-2 stdev change with age) and people with low intelligence (sorry bootcampers, you would already have a quantitative degree if you had a high qualitative IQ)—-what a solution
26 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 46.3 ms ] threadI worked for a FAANG, and I thought ageism was a problem there -- I worried that I needed to be financially ready to retire at 50, because I might be unemployable there by then.
Now I'm at a younger company and you're seen as washed up at 35.
I’m in my early 40s now but I’m forcing myself to think about what type of company and team I’d fit into in 10 years. I enjoy working at startups/scale ups. I’m the oldest person in the engineering team now (by over 10 years).
My concern is that even with the best of intentions by an interviewer not to discriminate on age, I worry that I’m going to have to end up at a multinational or consultancy in the future because hiring someone 50+ in a startup filled with 20-somethings would be chalked up as a “culture fit” issue.
It is a deficit of some younger people that they don't value other perspectives, and I think points to a bad work environment.
A medium to large software company never hires 45, a small software company almost never hires 35+.
As for the "bootcamp graduades", there is huge variance in the outcomes, but the median result is very disappointing.
If cooking suddenly became very lucrative and I went to a culinary bootcamp right now, I’d almost surely be a failure at a career change in that direction in large part because for 40+ years of being exposed to cooking, I showed no significant prior interest.
> Oddly enough the former chefs we work with are kicking butt - sample size is too small but maybe cooking is a great gateway to coding??
I spent about a year doing short order cooking to put myself through uni, nothing fancy, but I might offer some insight here. Cooking in busy service shifts might transfer well to coding because they demand retaining both a complex, large state in your head with minimal prompting, and update that state frequently with complex flows. Keeping hot food hot, cold food cold, hitting the order all at the same time, meeting the wait people at just the right time, for a baseline steady rate of never less than 5 orders deep simultaneously, peaking to 12-15, and handling emergencies on the fly (running out of sauce pans, spilled food, run out of ingredients, etc.), bears some abstract similarities to coding.
And they do it in uncomfortable, loud conditions, people shouting all the time, tempers flaring from time to time. 4-8 hours a day, five days a week, with few breaks. Think of it as they keep the equivalent of coders' flow state under what coders consider intolerable conditions. For a tiny fraction of the pay.
If you find a chef/cook who can run a crew of 6+ and pull their load as good as or better than any individual member of the crew, then they've got the raw chops to transfer that skill to keep pretty complex representations in their heads. The good ones I've seen intuitively use queuing theory without knowing it. The one caution I'd offer is watch for chronically short attention spans; there is a different kind of grinding in coding especially in debugging that rubs even many in this group the wrong way. Heck, too few coders have mastered that.
I'd like to hear others' experience with people or themselves who got into coding from a different field. My personal anecdata off the top of my head is I've seen a preponderance of military intelligence analysts, farmer/ranchers, and philosophers seem to do well coding.
It is uncommon. I've fallen in with a pretty good team. A few of them formerly worked for a big multinational.
I'm a former philosophy grad student.
Symbolic logic is basically the same as coding.
This is a regrettable culture misfit with the younger devs who do.
I am not sure I understand your point
The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.
That takes time. We call it wisdom. There are no wise young people - only wise beyond their years.
Diversity is undervalued in tech. Many companies have a hiring process that's like an assembly line, and it produces workers who are all the same, replaceable cogs. Managers tend to like this, in theory, but the workforce ends up being less than the sum of its parts, because the workers tend to all have the same biases, all the same weaknesses, all the same strengths, so the weaknesses are magnified, and the strengths have diminishing returns. What you want in a great team is individuals who have different, complementing strengths. And who can cover for each other's weaknesses, because they don't all have the same ones.
I would advise against bootcamps. We pretty much stopped recruiting from those because the signal to noise ratio was just too low.