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I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 ye
by JeremyMorgan 10y ago
I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 years old and get a job if you can do work. Maybe you can't get a job at fart.IO building an API for some craft beer BS but at many mid to large companies 40 is still an average.
The last 4-5 companies I've been at value bullet points over anything else (for what that's worth). If you're 40+ and coming in showing off your PHP skills, JQuery or WinForms experience you'll get dumped, but the same goes for the 23 year old with that skill set.
My advice is always the same for developers my age: Keep with the times! If you aren't passionate enough about this work to continue learning and advancing on your own time get out. Go do something slower paced. Don't expect the industry to change.
- wyclif 10y agocoming in showing off your PHP skills, JQuery or WinForms experience you'll get dumped This sounds odd to me. I don't doubt it happens, but why? PHP roles are still going strong, and there's a ton of PHP work that is not legacy code.
- kuhzaam 10y agoDammit.... fart.IO is unavailable.
- paulddraper 10y agoIt's just parked too :( What a waste. Could have make some nice parody material.
- DigitalJack 10y agoCraft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer. Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.
- ksk 10y agoOn that note, why are there so many new IPAs in PNW? I like IPAs, but I doubt most people want them.
- st3v3r 10y agoOn the contrary, that's why so many are made.
- Kluny 10y agoMy theory: they taste like pine trees, and we've got a lot of pine trees, so it just feels right. Try drinking an IPA in Mexico sometimes. Super inappropes. But in PNW it makes sense. For awhile, til you get sick of it.
- throwanem 10y agoPine trees smell good. They do not taste good.
- unprepare 10y agoWe've got a lot of pinetrees in michigan as well, but we generally dont have these super hoppy styles. I think theres also regional hop variations, so maybe theyre just less piney here.
- Bartweiss 10y agoCascade hops are super strong, and are grown out in the PNW/Colorado area, so that's a big chunk of the problem. Other hop varieties lend themselves much better to malty beers, or to darker options where the bitterness is more subtle.
- emodendroket 10y agoPine trees are even on the flag for New England.
- logfromblammo 10y agoHere's an idea for a craft brew. Replace the hops with actual white pine needles. And Googling for "beer with pine needles"... ...dammit. "Spruce beer". That idea is literally centuries old. At least five breweries currently use evergreen bits as flavoring agents, and at least 16 have tried reviving gruit recipes in some form or another. Apparently, Sitka spruce tips are popular in Alaska, being far more available than hops.
- wcummings 10y agoNot just Portland, the entire American craft beer scene is infected with shitty, indistinguishable IPA's that all taste like a mountain of hops.
- enjo 10y agoThere are definitely a lot of bad IPA's, but that's hardly even a significant part of the American Craft Beer scene these days.
- pfranz 10y agoGoogling "west coast beer style" has this[0] as the first result. You could argue that this isn't a canonical source or that things have changed since the thread in 2011--but the stigma is still around. [0] https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=6498.0 https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic...
- Bartweiss 10y agoI would argue that the IPA fandom hasn't diminished (especially out west), but other things have arisen alongside it. On the east coast, I see an impressive number of sours and dubbels coming out of craft shops, and the midwest is big on bold, malty offerings like ambers and oatmeal stouts.
- pfranz 10y agoI haven't seen IPAs drop in popularity (I much prefer darker, maltier beers), but I do feel like more recently IPAs have tried to use hops in more interesting ways instead of just going for XIPA/DIPA. I hope if hops stay around this trend continues. I would have thought the hops shortage of 2008 would have forced breweries to try something else, so by now it's probably demand driven. I hear there's a new hops shortage coming up.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
- SapphireSun 10y agoThe reason IPA is so popular is because for so long the american beer landscape was dominated by brews like Budwiser that are quite weakly flavored. This was an artifact of prohibition destroying most of the competitive landscape with the survivors dominating the market for decades and in turn using anticompetitive laws to their advantage. IPA is a reaction against that flavor profile. You'll be starting to see new flavors come about as people (like yourself) become tired of IPAs.
- pfranz 10y agoWhy not flavor with malts? I haven't looked into the history of American beer, but many styles seem to come from the price of local ingredients and qualities of local water. That makes me things hops were cheap and plentiful and caused the IPA trend.
- SapphireSun 10y agoI'm not a super expert, this is just what my friends in the biz have told me. I wouldn't be surprised if several factors conspired to create the IPA trend. Yes, there are many ways to infuse flavor into beer, some of which you mentioned above. My friends make IPA styles, but also many others using all kinds of tricks like malts, waters with different minerals, pHs, different base ingredients, brewing wheat in different ways. My buddy even domesticated a new strain of yeast. If you're in Boston, give Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville a try (https://goo.gl/maps/bm22XaBvFPQ2 https://goo.gl/maps/bm22XaBvFPQ2). I have something of an interest of it, but I (unsurprisingly) recommend them.
- Bartweiss 10y agoAeronaut is a great option for some new flavors. They do all-out hoppy IPAs, but if that's not your thing the other options are distinctive and tasty.
- hx87 10y agoI have wondered about the same thing--both hoppiness and maltiness are good reactions against bland mass market beers, but somehow big malts never took off the way hoppy IPAs did. Is it difficult/expensive to make malty beers?
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoThat's a shame, I like WinForms, JQuery and PHP.
- arenaninja 10y agoIs the potshot on jQuery and PHP really necessary? I know enough people where I live making six figures (low COL city) with PHP, SQL and jQuery that I don't think they're ready to sunset.
- gburt 10y agoThis unfortunate obsession with new and shiny in the Valley is why we have to learn lessons like the benefits of relational databases over and over. Most of the new stuff isn't improved, it is simply different.
- exstudent2 10y agoRelational dbs sure, but there are legitimate scale reasons to use a distributed key value store (for instance). There is no reason to be stuck with PHP today though. It's a very backward language when you compare to something with a modern type system/features (e.g. Go, Rust, Clojure, Java 8+, Scala...). Devs need to have a passion for learning technology. Not because it's the shiny new thing but because the new tech often _does_ offer benefit.
- mywittyname 10y agoOften times you have no control over the technology stack you use because other factors drive your choices. I'm stuck developing in PHP because the tool we are using is written in PHP.
- exstudent2 10y agoYou often have to learn this stuff outside of your regular job. Once you know another stack then you can find another job using it. That's how you exert control over your career. Tying yourself to one company (or stack) is a slow death sentence. EDIT: to those downvoting this... Do you disagree with me (i.e. you think it's a good career decision to stick with a single tech stack) or do you agree but dislike that it has to be this way? Genuinely curious because I didn't think what I said was controversial at all, just industry observation/common sense.
- JasonCEC 10y agoOuch man.... not all craft beer software is BS CRUD apps overbuilt on react.js by 22 year old hipsters deploying single function "micro-services" each in their own docker container... Brewing beer is a form of manufacturing, and most manufacturing can be made better or more efficient though targeted software. [0] commenting because I don't want "craft beer software" to become a joke. Some of us actually work in that industry.
- logfromblammo 10y agoHow about we qualify that instead as "craft-beer-advertising software"? Monitoring the temperature and pressure of your fermentation vessels securely from any commodity mobile device would be productive and useful. Figuring out how to re-skin the collect-and-compete RPG game genre onto all the different flavors of HoppyHipsterBeard-brand beers seems to be the sort of thing grandparent post was referring to.
- lfowles 10y agoIsn't manufacturing also dominated by PLCs and ladder logic? Not sure that's much better for my sanity!
- cynoclast 10y ago>[0] commenting because I don't want "craft beer software" to become a joke. Some of us actually work in that industry. So make good craft beer, and it won't last as a joke. Trying to police people's words doesn't. I'm not trying to be a dick, either. It didn't work for SJWs, it won't work for craft beers. Ten million people nagging for 8 hours a day doesn't accomplish as much as one person doing.
- ericd 10y agoIs jQuery too low level for people now?
- brlewis 10y agoIt's too reliant on state changes all over the place, making even medium-complexity web apps really hard to maintain. I find with Mithril (similar to React but smaller) it's a lot easier to understand how my app gets into a particular state.
- collyw 10y agoOnly if you keep too much of the complexity in the front end.
- dismantlethesun 10y agoWell.. as a client interface HTML/CSS/Javascript have all been fairly anaemic compared to what is possible with native interfaces. Once you've worked with a native interface, you're loathe to give up the potential for creation that comes with it, just to keep complexity out of the front-end. Arguably, one could say people need to be retrained, and need to stop trying to make the web into something its not.... but considering the trends, I think that ship has sailed.
- WalterSear 10y agoIt's too primitive an abstraction. It was great when you were just fiddling a few little ajax widgets on a static page, but it doesn't scale.
- ericd 10y agoThat's what I meant by low level. Frankly, I disagree about scalability - that's up to the program's architect.
- WalterSear 10y ago
- FLUX-YOU 10y ago>If you aren't passionate enough about this work to continue learning and advancing on your own time get out. Go do something slower paced. Don't expect the industry to change. Spending time learning something that dies a few months later is boring and annoying. Give me practical and tested toys, damn it, not some new language every month. There's a comfortable wave to ride between "plenty established" and "highly experimental joyride that's really meant for someone's resume". Things on that wave have a high chance of becoming a decent slice of the job market but they haven't yet. That's the category I like to learn from but it takes time for things to get to that position. You also have to pick what you put on your resume carefully, because some employers will see you as being all over the place. But if you don't put new things, you're seen as old and behind-the-times.
- bmj 10y agoIf you aren't passionate enough about this work to continue learning and advancing on your own time get out. I understand that many other domains value this sort of thing, but perhaps not to the same degree as the software industry. The issue could be that employers are afraid to invest in their current employees (that is, given them opportunities to advance their skills on company time) because there is such a high rate of turnover in many tech companies. It makes more financial sense to put the burden on the employee (or potential employee) because it likely only benefits them in the long run. I do, however, see that in more established companies (particularly those that don't still operate in "start-up mode"), there is more willingness to invest in the employees and build their skill sets. I've been with my current employer for over eight years, and they have always been willing to give me time to learn new tech and stay on top of trends that affect our business. Of course, on my current team of 10 people, only one person has been with the company for less than three years.
- whamlastxmas 10y agoI worked at a company in the suburbs of Portland for about a year and was really impressed when they hired a guy in his 60s to do a job currently being done by 4-5 people in their late 20s (a mix of males and females). I wouldn't necessarily say he was slow in picking up stuff, but his style of learning is was definitely a lot different. He was a great asset and it alleviated some of the subconscious biases I had myself.
- collyw 10y agoIf PHP and Jquery are fine to get the job done, whats the point? I have learned a few languages now - Java, Perl and now Python. Python has pretty much everything I need. I have looked at NoSQl databases, but haven't found a use case where they would be better than relational databases. I prefer to write good quality Django code than to write my first app in yet another language / stack.