15 ms·

I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so

by tjic 10y ago

I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. I live in NH, on a farm and work (mostly) remotely. I've got a network of contacts, I get pinged w requests for contracting work, I do the job, I get paid. No one asks me about my age (45) or judges me because of it. Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots.

SadWebDeveloper 10y ago
Problem with your solution is that you already now people, if you don't you have to rely on websites like freelancer that pretty much are the same as paid-to-win-the-bid in modern mobile video games and it's sad when people all over the world bid really low those making the website effectively racist regarding devs that to this for living instead of side jobs.
- tjic 10y ago
  Knowing people happens after 20 years in the industry. It may very well be that the best way to kick start your career is to move to SF or some other big city. So be it. I did the first 20 years of my career in the Boston area. I have no idea what you mean about websites being racist. For picking lower cost developers? It seems odd to call people who give work to people in other countries "racist". Isn't doing that exactly the opposite of racism?
  - SadWebDeveloper 10y ago
    Just try to win a project on any modern "freelancing" website and you will understand... personally i used to make solid money on Rent-A-Coder even before getting my CS degree and when they sell us to Freelancer, i started losing bids and the great bids were "closed" to only accept bid "first world developers" (ie US Developers) or limited to people that already paid for the website membership to get in so pretty much any bid today had like 20 indian developers working for 5c/hour.
    - tjic 10y ago
      Re-read my statements above. I'm telling you not to use those websites. Move to the city, make contacts, do good work.
    - debaserab2 10y ago
      So why not pay for a membership if it gets you access to more exclusive contracts? Or establish relationships with people instead of lowest common denominator platforms and let the quality of your work sell itself? Word of mouth and personal recommendations are worth more than how many stars you are on a platform.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tjic 10y ago
  Also, the way to compete with someone who's charging $10/hr for crappy code is to do what they can't or won't do: * be an excellent communicator * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * be a whole stack developer * manage "up". Think of things before your manager does, alert the manager to dangers and problems, give expert advice, avoid the problems. Managers love people who solve the total problem; they hate people who solve one very very narrow niche problem and then leave them (the manager) dealing with a leaky bag of shit. Saying "well, that wasn't in scope!" does not make them happier about holding the leaky bag. I guarantee you that no one bidding $5/hr and working on a timezone 12 hours away delivers this. So, to recap: 1) work in a city when young 2) make contacts 3) be good at what you do 4) manage up ; solve the REAL problem Do that and you'll have lots of work and make good money.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    timezone 12 hours away from where? US?
    - spoonie 10y ago
      SE Asia/Australia are 8-16 hours ahead of either Europe or the US.
  - bluetwo 10y ago
    Yep. Yep. Yep. Agreed.
  - jnbiche 10y ago
    > * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * I agree, and I hate it. What happened to the days when I could just be productive? Now, I have to spend hours "working as a team" (ie, socializing) on Slack. I hate it so much that I've dramatically cut down on the work I do. It's not that I'm asocial, it's just that I don't want to be exchanging memes when there's work to be done. I want to do the work, and do it well, so I can spend time with my wife and kids. Work for work, socializing for after work. Even with IRC, it didn't use to be like this. What happened? For the record, I'm not talking about being responsive, or good communications. That's critical. I've always responded to client emails within 2-3 hours (I break up my day into 3 email checks). But I find it impossible to get much done with teams that expect me to hang out in Slack or Hipchat all day long. But the younger kids love it. Maybe they code and chat at the same time, I don't know. I can't do it. Doesn't anyone just hire people to do a job anymore? Are even contractors doomed to spending their days "meshing"?
- bdunbar 10y ago
  Everyone knows someone. Build on that. You work with people. Those people know people. They know other people. Someone says 'I need a good PHP guy' and a guy in the network replies 'I know a guy, SadWebDeveloper - here is his email address'. Boom: you have made contact with someone who wants to hire you. Join the Whatever User Group in your area. Go to the meetings - introduce yourself. Be a presence on their mail list. Boom: more networking contacts. This is a really good example. TJIC and I have talked on the internet for -years- via email and twitter and blog. A customer of mine mentioned she was looking for a local developer (Los Angeles) but couldn't find anyone who met even her minimal standards. I said 'Hey, I know a guy', he lives 8,000 miles away, he's about a hermit and a half, and he knows his sh*t' and a few weeks later TJIC got some months of work and everyone was happy. And now, here we are, talking. Maybe I can be converted to a networking contact. You never know, hunh?
  - mhurron 10y ago
    > Everyone knows someone No they don't. And your solution to not being stuck with closed and insular groups is join some closed and insular groups so that your name can be passed around as one of the group.
    - tjic 10y ago
      If you want to be miserable and ineffective, you can be. All you have to do is set your mind to it. ...and you're doing a great job so far!
      - drdeadringer 10y ago
        mhurron has a valid point and it is worth considering beyond him//her "doing a great job so far" being "miserable and ineffective".
        SyneRyder 10y ago
        I downvoted mhurron, I found it a fatalistic response that isn't constructive or helpful. Even if you feel you don't know anyone, you have to put effort in to meeting people. Here's three ways I got remote work before I knew anyone: * I emailed a band I liked whose song was featured as Demo Of The Month in a magazine, asking to buy all their CDs. We kept in touch, and months later they asked me for some (free) advice about setting up their website. Later again, one of their friends was looking to hire someone & they recommended me - I worked remotely for them for 10 years. * I wrote a script in PHP and made both a free version & a paid version, then mentioned it on a forum. I got a handful of sales, but one of those customers liked the code quality so much they asked if they could hire me for contract work. That work was done remotely too. * I went to a blogger conference overseas & before I went I made a Twitter list of all the attendees, read their tweets and made online friends with a few who I found interesting. I met some of them at the conference, and one of them I kept in touch with for a year after the conference. We grabbed some coffee when they visited my city, I mentioned I was having a slow work period, they mentioned they needed someone technical, and we worked together for a couple of years. Again, mostly remote work (though I did fly to their offices every few months). Instead of being negative, plant the seeds now. Start making friends, keep those friendships alive, keep letting people know what you do, keep creating proof that you're good at what you do (even if it's your own projects). It's a long process and it still won't guarantee you work, but it will give you a much better chance of offers coming your way. That's what worked for me anyway.
- witty_username 10y ago
  How is the website racist?
- ASalazarMX 10y ago
  "making the website effectively racist regarding devs" Just so your communication skills improve, discrimination is not the same as racism.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    On this different topic: I got a lot more relaxed about language after reading numerous books by linguists (because that is their attitude, they just watch what is going on). In this context, I think the train has left the station (as we Germans say, "der Zug ist abgefahren") and "racist" now indeed has a new much wider meaning in public discourse contexts. It now seems to include "being different", in not necessarily clearly defined ways, the exact nature of the differences are to be taken from context. I could just yesterday or today read about "racism" in a Guardian article about an attack on a Polish immigrant somewhere in Britain, who certainly wasn't of a different race [0]. However, I'm very relaxed about it - everybody knows what is meant. Also, a shift in meaning in some context does not mean the stricter meaning of the word is lost! The exact same people who may use a word loosely in one context use it with its strict meaning in a different one. If you start talking about biology this will happen. Words and language are extreme flexible, and such a change is not the end of the world. I think their is some justification: When the word is used in such wider meaning it's more about the effect, not the cause. My motto for language is the same as in programming: Be as lenient as possible with input - but be strict about output. In the language context that means I won't criticize when I actually clearly understand the meaning, but I myself try to use the right expressions, grammar, punctuation, etc. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/12/polish-man-attacked-beaten-gang-20-teenagers-leeds-racially-aggravated-assault https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/12/polish-man-a... (sub-headline: "...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated")
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      "...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated" The term is used because the person being attacked was thought of as being of a different "race" by their racist attackers (and because that's the reason he was attacked; bot for being non-heterosexual, or for being a fan of the wrong football team). Not because one is in agreeance with the alleged "racial" distinctions (in the mind of the racist). BTW: der Zug ist abgefahren In English one would say "the horse has left the barn."
- larve 10y ago
  I never had any problem finding serious gigs on freelancer.com. Advertise your rate (in my case 70-100$/h depending on the technology), without bowing down to the $10/h bids. Just the fact that you can write a grammatically correct sentence in your bid, with a few questions showing that you know what the problem is about, is enough to get you a solid gig. If people don't hire you because you are too expensive / think they can get away with a cheaper bid, you don't want to work for them. Now, there are obviously a lot of great programmers living in places with lower living costs, but they are already buried in projects anyway. I usually find a good "day" gig in about 1-2 h on freelancer. Do two or three of those, with clients who turn out to be solid, intelligent and paying promptly, and you most probably found a reliable pipeline of work.
sprocket 10y ago
I'm in a very similar situation; I live on a island in western Canada, on a farm, and contract remotely. I don't have the extreme cost of living like our nearest city (Vancouver, BC), and being remote, no one cares about how old I am, they care that I can get the job done.
daxorid 10y ago
Seconded. I operate out of rural Arizona and travel to California (where my business is located) as needed. Thirty second commute, time with my family, and the opportunity to interact with people whose lifestyle concerns actually seem grounded in reality. You couldn't pay me enough to live in a place like SF.
- nicobn 10y ago
  Ditto that. I also live in AZ. I'm curious; where in rural Arizona are you based off ?
  - daxorid 10y ago
    I am in Apache County.
rdtsc 10y ago
> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. I like that quote. Copied it to my notes for future reference. To expand more on the topic, I wonder if remote workers are a good way to bring some revival for smaller rural communities. I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other, there is a sense of a community. It is quiet. There is probably a tipping point where if enough companies would hire remote workers, people won't be afraid to move to such communities. Currently many (including me) even if they do remote work, would probably be hesitant to move, because if they have to jump ship, they know there is a smaller chance of getting remote work again. So staying closer to a tech center seems like a better option.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  it's happening more and more as the 90s and 00s veterans get older and want more land/space/whatever. the recent trend in insane housing prices has definitely accelerated it, just from my circle of anecdotes.
- norea-armozel 10y ago
  If I could get a reliable car so I could get to a metro when I needed to see an endocrinologist I would definitely do my work remotely from a rural community. I know that parts of Kansas have FTTH (it's not gigabit but it's reliable and has no datacaps) which are very cheap to live in. Edit: It looks like Nex-Tech now offers gigabit internet. It's around $200 a month with cable and phone but to be fair it's rural Kansas. I use to pay $65 for their 10/5 when that was the mid-tier Internet only package. So they've really improved their service.
  - bigtex 10y ago
    I have business class internet in a rural community in Tx. Advertised speed in 10/2 but I usually get around 20/2 for $100/month. It is fixed wireless.
    - sfifs 10y ago
tentakull 10y ago
Working in SV, quite honestly the best member of my team is >40 (I'm in my late 20's). I don't understand ageism at all, experience really makes the job easier and I value that wealth of knowledge as a more junior dev
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  The best team composition is an age of ranges, spanning 20 years- eg: early twenties to late 40s. (I wouldn't turn down an engineer older than that though, of course). And ranges of experiences. You need diversity to refine the ideas before committing them to code. Often the younger guys are faster at producing features, but produce lower quality code while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it. Both is a good combo. I think a lot of the startup failures of really early stage startups might be due to the entire team being exactly the same age and right out of college. So they make mistakes that have been made many times before. Put another way there are many mistakes that can kill you and the more experience you have on your team the better you are at identifying them-- but you have to have innovation and new ideas too. Which is not to say that any of these sets of characteristics are exclusive to a specific age -- this is just generalizations.
  - groby_b 10y ago
    > while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it It's the older women who rock both architecture and quick execution. :) ("I'm sorry, but you opened the door, counselor") Age does not immediately confer advantages or disadvantages - we just often use it as a proxy for "experienced", "more methodical", "slower", "inflexible", "good mentor". (Your pick here) All of those are independent of age. Please don't compose a team by age. (Speaking as an older person. I bring a lot of things to the table, but my birthdate isn't one of them)
    - 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
      You can't have 30 years of experience when you're 20 years old. You're unlikely to have 15 years experience when you're 20 years old, and you're certainly going to have a different perspective when you're more years into programming, which has good and bad aspects. Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me. Hire the best people first, then make your team diverse, both across thinking and across ages and across everything else. But there's a synergy I've noticed more than once when pairing a 40ish with a 20ish. OR even a 20ish, 30ish and 40ish three person team. I'm obviously not (and it should be clear in the above message) calling for quotas, but it's a good goal. Homogenity reduces ingenuity.
cmbaus 10y ago
Like there are no bigots in NH. When I lived in Central NH I had a long hair and almost got run out of town for being a "fucking long haired hippie"
- hour_glass 10y ago
  Haha mind if I ask where you were?
- tclancy 10y ago
  Well sure, Central NH. Or Northern NH. Or Western NH. But down here on the Seacoast . . . well, that's why I live away from everybody too.
- madgar 10y ago
  When I lived in central NH there was someone who lived in the town who proudly drove a white sedan covered in racial epithets using magic marker and scratched into the paint. A hangman's noose was scratched into the trunk along with the phrase "linch all n* * * *rs". Naturally that's just the most extreme example; far more commonplace was casual ignorant small-talk generalizing about "the blacks"/"the coloreds"/"the hispanics" in gas stations/convenience stores/the barber/etc. And the soft bigotry of low expectations absolutely permeated an area where people could and did go months, years without seeing a nonwhite individual in person.
  - ncarroll 10y ago
    I have often had the urge to hang numbers. They are problems looking for a place to happen. Letters, on the other hand, are always ready for a chat. ;-)
    - madgar 10y ago
      The asterisks got eaten in my post, fixed that. To be clear, there were no asterisks on the car. And it wasn't funny.
      - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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wyager 10y ago
Absolutely agreed. Having lived all over the US, it seems to me that the places that are the most discriminatory and insular in practice are those that pride themselves on being inclusive in theory. NYC and SF have huge cultures of identity politics, with the end result that it's very clique-dominated and exclusive. NYC also has a very money-oriented social stratification. On the other hand, if you go to rural Montana, this sort of thing doesn't exist. The only "cliques" that exist might be e.g. what church you go to, but I was never judged negatively for not going to church. They just don't have the population density to be that picky about social circles, even if they wanted to be.
- marmot777 10y ago
  Sad but true.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  I don't agree, NYC and SF are vastly different. Most of the articles about ageism that have surfaced lately are about ageism in the Valley. For the most part this stuff doesn't fly in New York City.
darrmit 10y ago
I work from home four days a week and commute one day - usually around 2 hours round trip. I get paid less at this job than I would if I was willing to commute to the city where my office is located. But I consider the mental and emotional benefit of not having that daily grind to be worth more than the wage gap. I greatly prefer to slow pace of country life after a day working, whether at home or in the office. The technology industry is stressful enough without the added stress of city dwelling, in my opinion.
- bigtex 10y ago
  This is my same exact scenario as well. I have free range animals and occasionally a rooster will be right next to my office window and start crowing while on a call. I could make much more if I took a job in the city but that would be a 2 hour commute everyday. I get to have lunch with my family 4 days a week.
stcredzero 10y ago
San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away. - The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second scriptlet to answer the question. - The mention of anything that sounds "audiophile" automatically means you are a terrible douche who naively believes in all of Monster Cable's woo. No need to actually evaluate what you are saying through knowledge of physics. - You must subscribe to the magical powers of [insert paradigm/language here] or you are a dirty mudblood who's simply too dim to appreciate the magic. (Don't say anything like, "Soft factors, like how well your team works together, swamps the effect...") - You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks, or you obviously never covered the topic. This isn't even to mention weird prejudices and half-baked knowledge about older technologies. It's as if people didn't understand that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 is also a parody of programmers misunderstanding of technology.
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  > "You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks" This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    I just took the TripleByte assessment for Mixpanel and over half of it was this kind of shit. Worse, they threw in multiple-choice design questions. No, I would not use any of the complicated sets of things you presented me in this case, and do not think any of them is the right answer.
    - stcredzero 10y ago
aantix 10y ago
>Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. You hate where people are close-minded so you're _sticking_ with the countryside..? It's possible that NH countryside is different than the other small towns I've visited, but I have zero data points on that. Another discussion, another day. I lived in SF for five years and performed a couple of hundred interviews for the companies I consulted with. Software engineers have the capability to produce millions of dollars in profits with the right product. People can quickly get over prejudices if they think you will be able to produce that million dollar product. Keeping up with the startup Jones's is about relevancy. No one wants a senior engineer barking at them babbling about how "Smalltalk did the same thing 20 years ago and now we're just reinventing the wheel!". Do yourself a favor in the interview; do a bake off of old style vs new stack implementations. Compare and contrast. It shows your vast knowledge. And it quickly graduates you from grumpy old programmer to a mentor for the entire team. New web/mobile based companies start all the time in SF, and with each new fresh start comes the chance to wipe the slate clean and choose a newer stack that may provide a competitive advantage. Reactjs with redux right now, but probably something different in a year. New companies. New choice of stacks, all the time. The tides change quickly in SF. If you've been turned down by a Bay Area startup, I guarantee it's much less to do with your lack of skinny jeans or because you have some grey hairs.. P.S. Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45. You may have a team of fresh-out-of-Berkley-engineers and that's it. If you're not comfortable in a mentor setting, you may also get rejected. At a later stage in your career and with a young team, you're expected to contribute more than code.
- DominikR 10y ago
  > Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45. This is only true for startups and other companies that have small budgets or need cheap labor. If you are going after the high paying contracts you'll quickly learn that being 45 or older is often an advantage if you have the necessary experience. (not just technical skill but also social skill) These corporations aren't going to allow a 25 year old consulter to come in and take lead of a team or a product. (except if the person shows truly remarkable skill) If they hire young consulters it usually means they want someone that is cheap to hire and easy to fire.
draw_down 10y ago
> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. Mmmhmm, right. Anyway, I don't think anyone is saying that it's 100% impossible to find tech work if you're 45. I'm sure there is work, and I'm also sure it's the case that Bay area tech is different from elsewhere. But one of those differences is what gets produced- nobody is designing the iPhone outside of SF Bay, to put it bluntly. And it's important that work at that level is not age-discriminatory. I'm 35, just started at a Bay area company, one that makes really nice products and has some of the best designers anywhere. And I can already see it coming, so many of the people I work with are 25-27. The people who founded this company are a good bit younger than me. The grey hairs are people like the general counsel. Sure, nobody asked my age, and I look younger than I am anyway. But still, I see it coming.
blakeyrat 10y ago
The "Bay Area scene" is also pretty bad at figuring out that a lot of their problems only exist in the Bay Area. Although they're doing a heck of a job importing their horrible toxic culture up here to Seattle.
- biocomputation 10y ago
  I wish I could upvote this 1,000,000 times. This is absolute truth!
- geebee 10y ago
  I am curious, though, when you say "they" are importing their horrible toxic culture, who are you referring to? Not individuals necessarily, but are you referring to all San Franciscans, including those who were priced out of their childhood neighborhoods and are looking for somewhere else to live?
  - milcron 10y ago
    Valley CS geeks, of course.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  Don't forget Colorado. Texas is taking longer but obviously a larger area will take longer to pollute if you do it at a fixed rate.
bogomipz 10y ago
Interesting. Someone else recently mentioned remote working being a great antidote to age bias. Contract work also seems to avoid a lot of nonsense. There's a real irony that tech in "liberal cities" is provincial and close minded and you are avoiding that by being in the country on a farm.
SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
It's the rural countryside around here that put up gigantic Trump posters on their farms, so unless you're talking about some other definition of bigotry, I don't you can generalize "rural" as "not bigoted." Also: I have never had trouble getting jobs in the Bay Area, though I moved before I turned 45. I did however work with people who were late 40s/early 50s and engineers, so I didn't see a huge age prejudice.
- Zpalmtree 10y ago
  I'd rather keep politics off here, but implying trump=bigoted is a rather SF view :^)
  - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
    Trump makes bigoted statements. It's not a debate or a "view". It's just a fact.
jondubois 10y ago
I'm 27 now. My biggest fear is to not succeed in my career by the time I turn 40. The idea of having to give up working on my startup goals after 20 years of continuous failure is in itself terrifying enough - But combine that with the fact that I might be penniless; forced to join a mega-corporation to become corporate cattle. ... In a company filled with arrogant lucky people in their 20s bossing me around. I couldn't take it. I fear the next generation. I think MY generation is already so arrogant - We severely underestimate the value of experience. I was one of the few people lucky enough to learn that lesson early though. I once worked with a lady (a software engineer) who was in her early 40s and she always said that she never really cared much about her work. She always left work on the dot. I was 21 at the time and I had been working like crazy since I was 14 but even back then it was clear that she was a much better software engineer than I was. For me, my career was the center of my life; for her, it was just a way to pay the mortgage. In spite of what the media tries to tell us; 7 years of obsessive, passionate labour is not more valuable 22 years of 'bare minimum' labour. That's how valuable time is.
brlewis 10y ago
Could it simply be that we hear the most tech career horror stories from the Bay Area because that's the place with the most tech careers? I'd be as hesitant to make generalizations about a place as I would be to make generalizations about an age bracket.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  No, because 90% of tech jobs are outside of the Bay Area, but probably 90% of the tech job drama is in the Bay Area.
LargeCompanies 10y ago
Me too happy to work for the fed in the mid Atlantic region where the pay is almost as good as the valley and the age ranges from 30 to 65.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by tjic 10y ago

SadWebDeveloper 10y ago

Problem with your solution is that you already now people, if you don't you have to rely on websites like freelancer that pretty much are the same as paid-to-win-the-bid in modern mobile video games and it's sad when people all over the world bid really low those making the website effectively racist regarding devs that to this for living instead of side jobs.

tjic 10y ago
Knowing people happens after 20 years in the industry. It may very well be that the best way to kick start your career is to move to SF or some other big city. So be it. I did the first 20 years of my career in the Boston area. I have no idea what you mean about websites being racist. For picking lower cost developers? It seems odd to call people who give work to people in other countries "racist". Isn't doing that exactly the opposite of racism?
- SadWebDeveloper 10y ago
  Just try to win a project on any modern "freelancing" website and you will understand... personally i used to make solid money on Rent-A-Coder even before getting my CS degree and when they sell us to Freelancer, i started losing bids and the great bids were "closed" to only accept bid "first world developers" (ie US Developers) or limited to people that already paid for the website membership to get in so pretty much any bid today had like 20 indian developers working for 5c/hour.
  - tjic 10y ago
    Re-read my statements above. I'm telling you not to use those websites. Move to the city, make contacts, do good work.
  - debaserab2 10y ago
    So why not pay for a membership if it gets you access to more exclusive contracts? Or establish relationships with people instead of lowest common denominator platforms and let the quality of your work sell itself? Word of mouth and personal recommendations are worth more than how many stars you are on a platform.
deleted 10y ago
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tjic 10y ago
Also, the way to compete with someone who's charging $10/hr for crappy code is to do what they can't or won't do: * be an excellent communicator * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * be a whole stack developer * manage "up". Think of things before your manager does, alert the manager to dangers and problems, give expert advice, avoid the problems. Managers love people who solve the total problem; they hate people who solve one very very narrow niche problem and then leave them (the manager) dealing with a leaky bag of shit. Saying "well, that wasn't in scope!" does not make them happier about holding the leaky bag. I guarantee you that no one bidding $5/hr and working on a timezone 12 hours away delivers this. So, to recap: 1) work in a city when young 2) make contacts 3) be good at what you do 4) manage up ; solve the REAL problem Do that and you'll have lots of work and make good money.
- witty_username 10y ago
  timezone 12 hours away from where? US?
  - spoonie 10y ago
    SE Asia/Australia are 8-16 hours ahead of either Europe or the US.
- bluetwo 10y ago
  Yep. Yep. Yep. Agreed.
- jnbiche 10y ago
  > * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * I agree, and I hate it. What happened to the days when I could just be productive? Now, I have to spend hours "working as a team" (ie, socializing) on Slack. I hate it so much that I've dramatically cut down on the work I do. It's not that I'm asocial, it's just that I don't want to be exchanging memes when there's work to be done. I want to do the work, and do it well, so I can spend time with my wife and kids. Work for work, socializing for after work. Even with IRC, it didn't use to be like this. What happened? For the record, I'm not talking about being responsive, or good communications. That's critical. I've always responded to client emails within 2-3 hours (I break up my day into 3 email checks). But I find it impossible to get much done with teams that expect me to hang out in Slack or Hipchat all day long. But the younger kids love it. Maybe they code and chat at the same time, I don't know. I can't do it. Doesn't anyone just hire people to do a job anymore? Are even contractors doomed to spending their days "meshing"?
bdunbar 10y ago
Everyone knows someone. Build on that. You work with people. Those people know people. They know other people. Someone says 'I need a good PHP guy' and a guy in the network replies 'I know a guy, SadWebDeveloper - here is his email address'. Boom: you have made contact with someone who wants to hire you. Join the Whatever User Group in your area. Go to the meetings - introduce yourself. Be a presence on their mail list. Boom: more networking contacts. This is a really good example. TJIC and I have talked on the internet for -years- via email and twitter and blog. A customer of mine mentioned she was looking for a local developer (Los Angeles) but couldn't find anyone who met even her minimal standards. I said 'Hey, I know a guy', he lives 8,000 miles away, he's about a hermit and a half, and he knows his sh*t' and a few weeks later TJIC got some months of work and everyone was happy. And now, here we are, talking. Maybe I can be converted to a networking contact. You never know, hunh?
- mhurron 10y ago
  > Everyone knows someone No they don't. And your solution to not being stuck with closed and insular groups is join some closed and insular groups so that your name can be passed around as one of the group.
  - tjic 10y ago
    If you want to be miserable and ineffective, you can be. All you have to do is set your mind to it. ...and you're doing a great job so far!
    - drdeadringer 10y ago
      mhurron has a valid point and it is worth considering beyond him//her "doing a great job so far" being "miserable and ineffective".
      - SyneRyder 10y ago
        I downvoted mhurron, I found it a fatalistic response that isn't constructive or helpful. Even if you feel you don't know anyone, you have to put effort in to meeting people. Here's three ways I got remote work before I knew anyone: * I emailed a band I liked whose song was featured as Demo Of The Month in a magazine, asking to buy all their CDs. We kept in touch, and months later they asked me for some (free) advice about setting up their website. Later again, one of their friends was looking to hire someone & they recommended me - I worked remotely for them for 10 years. * I wrote a script in PHP and made both a free version & a paid version, then mentioned it on a forum. I got a handful of sales, but one of those customers liked the code quality so much they asked if they could hire me for contract work. That work was done remotely too. * I went to a blogger conference overseas & before I went I made a Twitter list of all the attendees, read their tweets and made online friends with a few who I found interesting. I met some of them at the conference, and one of them I kept in touch with for a year after the conference. We grabbed some coffee when they visited my city, I mentioned I was having a slow work period, they mentioned they needed someone technical, and we worked together for a couple of years. Again, mostly remote work (though I did fly to their offices every few months). Instead of being negative, plant the seeds now. Start making friends, keep those friendships alive, keep letting people know what you do, keep creating proof that you're good at what you do (even if it's your own projects). It's a long process and it still won't guarantee you work, but it will give you a much better chance of offers coming your way. That's what worked for me anyway.
witty_username 10y ago
How is the website racist?
ASalazarMX 10y ago
"making the website effectively racist regarding devs" Just so your communication skills improve, discrimination is not the same as racism.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  On this different topic: I got a lot more relaxed about language after reading numerous books by linguists (because that is their attitude, they just watch what is going on). In this context, I think the train has left the station (as we Germans say, "der Zug ist abgefahren") and "racist" now indeed has a new much wider meaning in public discourse contexts. It now seems to include "being different", in not necessarily clearly defined ways, the exact nature of the differences are to be taken from context. I could just yesterday or today read about "racism" in a Guardian article about an attack on a Polish immigrant somewhere in Britain, who certainly wasn't of a different race [0]. However, I'm very relaxed about it - everybody knows what is meant. Also, a shift in meaning in some context does not mean the stricter meaning of the word is lost! The exact same people who may use a word loosely in one context use it with its strict meaning in a different one. If you start talking about biology this will happen. Words and language are extreme flexible, and such a change is not the end of the world. I think their is some justification: When the word is used in such wider meaning it's more about the effect, not the cause. My motto for language is the same as in programming: Be as lenient as possible with input - but be strict about output. In the language context that means I won't criticize when I actually clearly understand the meaning, but I myself try to use the right expressions, grammar, punctuation, etc. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/12/polish-man-attacked-beaten-gang-20-teenagers-leeds-racially-aggravated-assault https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/12/polish-man-a... (sub-headline: "...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated")
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    "...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated" The term is used because the person being attacked was thought of as being of a different "race" by their racist attackers (and because that's the reason he was attacked; bot for being non-heterosexual, or for being a fan of the wrong football team). Not because one is in agreeance with the alleged "racial" distinctions (in the mind of the racist). BTW: der Zug ist abgefahren In English one would say "the horse has left the barn."
larve 10y ago
I never had any problem finding serious gigs on freelancer.com. Advertise your rate (in my case 70-100$/h depending on the technology), without bowing down to the $10/h bids. Just the fact that you can write a grammatically correct sentence in your bid, with a few questions showing that you know what the problem is about, is enough to get you a solid gig. If people don't hire you because you are too expensive / think they can get away with a cheaper bid, you don't want to work for them. Now, there are obviously a lot of great programmers living in places with lower living costs, but they are already buried in projects anyway. I usually find a good "day" gig in about 1-2 h on freelancer. Do two or three of those, with clients who turn out to be solid, intelligent and paying promptly, and you most probably found a reliable pipeline of work.

sprocket 10y ago

I'm in a very similar situation; I live on a island in western Canada, on a farm, and contract remotely. I don't have the extreme cost of living like our nearest city (Vancouver, BC), and being remote, no one cares about how old I am, they care that I can get the job done.

daxorid 10y ago

Seconded. I operate out of rural Arizona and travel to California (where my business is located) as needed. Thirty second commute, time with my family, and the opportunity to interact with people whose lifestyle concerns actually seem grounded in reality. You couldn't pay me enough to live in a place like SF.

nicobn 10y ago
Ditto that. I also live in AZ. I'm curious; where in rural Arizona are you based off ?
- daxorid 10y ago
  I am in Apache County.

rdtsc 10y ago

> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. I like that quote. Copied it to my notes for future reference. To expand more on the topic, I wonder if remote workers are a good way to bring some revival for smaller rural communities. I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other, there is a sense of a community. It is quiet. There is probably a tipping point where if enough companies would hire remote workers, people won't be afraid to move to such communities. Currently many (including me) even if they do remote work, would probably be hesitant to move, because if they have to jump ship, they know there is a smaller chance of getting remote work again. So staying closer to a tech center seems like a better option.

beachstartup 10y ago
it's happening more and more as the 90s and 00s veterans get older and want more land/space/whatever. the recent trend in insane housing prices has definitely accelerated it, just from my circle of anecdotes.
norea-armozel 10y ago
If I could get a reliable car so I could get to a metro when I needed to see an endocrinologist I would definitely do my work remotely from a rural community. I know that parts of Kansas have FTTH (it's not gigabit but it's reliable and has no datacaps) which are very cheap to live in. Edit: It looks like Nex-Tech now offers gigabit internet. It's around $200 a month with cable and phone but to be fair it's rural Kansas. I use to pay $65 for their 10/5 when that was the mid-tier Internet only package. So they've really improved their service.
- bigtex 10y ago
  I have business class internet in a rural community in Tx. Advertised speed in 10/2 but I usually get around 20/2 for $100/month. It is fixed wireless.
  - sfifs 10y ago

tentakull 10y ago

Working in SV, quite honestly the best member of my team is >40 (I'm in my late 20's). I don't understand ageism at all, experience really makes the job easier and I value that wealth of knowledge as a more junior dev

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
The best team composition is an age of ranges, spanning 20 years- eg: early twenties to late 40s. (I wouldn't turn down an engineer older than that though, of course). And ranges of experiences. You need diversity to refine the ideas before committing them to code. Often the younger guys are faster at producing features, but produce lower quality code while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it. Both is a good combo. I think a lot of the startup failures of really early stage startups might be due to the entire team being exactly the same age and right out of college. So they make mistakes that have been made many times before. Put another way there are many mistakes that can kill you and the more experience you have on your team the better you are at identifying them-- but you have to have innovation and new ideas too. Which is not to say that any of these sets of characteristics are exclusive to a specific age -- this is just generalizations.
- groby_b 10y ago
  > while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it It's the older women who rock both architecture and quick execution. :) ("I'm sorry, but you opened the door, counselor") Age does not immediately confer advantages or disadvantages - we just often use it as a proxy for "experienced", "more methodical", "slower", "inflexible", "good mentor". (Your pick here) All of those are independent of age. Please don't compose a team by age. (Speaking as an older person. I bring a lot of things to the table, but my birthdate isn't one of them)
  - 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
    You can't have 30 years of experience when you're 20 years old. You're unlikely to have 15 years experience when you're 20 years old, and you're certainly going to have a different perspective when you're more years into programming, which has good and bad aspects. Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me. Hire the best people first, then make your team diverse, both across thinking and across ages and across everything else. But there's a synergy I've noticed more than once when pairing a 40ish with a 20ish. OR even a 20ish, 30ish and 40ish three person team. I'm obviously not (and it should be clear in the above message) calling for quotas, but it's a good goal. Homogenity reduces ingenuity.

cmbaus 10y ago

Like there are no bigots in NH. When I lived in Central NH I had a long hair and almost got run out of town for being a "fucking long haired hippie"

hour_glass 10y ago
Haha mind if I ask where you were?
tclancy 10y ago
Well sure, Central NH. Or Northern NH. Or Western NH. But down here on the Seacoast . . . well, that's why I live away from everybody too.
madgar 10y ago
When I lived in central NH there was someone who lived in the town who proudly drove a white sedan covered in racial epithets using magic marker and scratched into the paint. A hangman's noose was scratched into the trunk along with the phrase "linch all n* * * *rs". Naturally that's just the most extreme example; far more commonplace was casual ignorant small-talk generalizing about "the blacks"/"the coloreds"/"the hispanics" in gas stations/convenience stores/the barber/etc. And the soft bigotry of low expectations absolutely permeated an area where people could and did go months, years without seeing a nonwhite individual in person.
- ncarroll 10y ago
  I have often had the urge to hang numbers. They are problems looking for a place to happen. Letters, on the other hand, are always ready for a chat. ;-)
  - madgar 10y ago
    The asterisks got eaten in my post, fixed that. To be clear, there were no asterisks on the car. And it wasn't funny.
    - 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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wyager 10y ago

Absolutely agreed. Having lived all over the US, it seems to me that the places that are the most discriminatory and insular in practice are those that pride themselves on being inclusive in theory. NYC and SF have huge cultures of identity politics, with the end result that it's very clique-dominated and exclusive. NYC also has a very money-oriented social stratification. On the other hand, if you go to rural Montana, this sort of thing doesn't exist. The only "cliques" that exist might be e.g. what church you go to, but I was never judged negatively for not going to church. They just don't have the population density to be that picky about social circles, even if they wanted to be.

marmot777 10y ago
Sad but true.
bogomipz 10y ago
I don't agree, NYC and SF are vastly different. Most of the articles about ageism that have surfaced lately are about ageism in the Valley. For the most part this stuff doesn't fly in New York City.

darrmit 10y ago

I work from home four days a week and commute one day - usually around 2 hours round trip. I get paid less at this job than I would if I was willing to commute to the city where my office is located. But I consider the mental and emotional benefit of not having that daily grind to be worth more than the wage gap. I greatly prefer to slow pace of country life after a day working, whether at home or in the office. The technology industry is stressful enough without the added stress of city dwelling, in my opinion.

bigtex 10y ago
This is my same exact scenario as well. I have free range animals and occasionally a rooster will be right next to my office window and start crowing while on a call. I could make much more if I took a job in the city but that would be a 2 hour commute everyday. I get to have lunch with my family 4 days a week.

stcredzero 10y ago

San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away. - The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second scriptlet to answer the question. - The mention of anything that sounds "audiophile" automatically means you are a terrible douche who naively believes in all of Monster Cable's woo. No need to actually evaluate what you are saying through knowledge of physics. - You must subscribe to the magical powers of [insert paradigm/language here] or you are a dirty mudblood who's simply too dim to appreciate the magic. (Don't say anything like, "Soft factors, like how well your team works together, swamps the effect...") - You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks, or you obviously never covered the topic. This isn't even to mention weird prejudices and half-baked knowledge about older technologies. It's as if people didn't understand that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 is also a parody of programmers misunderstanding of technology.

InclinedPlane 10y ago
> "You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks" This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  I just took the TripleByte assessment for Mixpanel and over half of it was this kind of shit. Worse, they threw in multiple-choice design questions. No, I would not use any of the complicated sets of things you presented me in this case, and do not think any of them is the right answer.
  - stcredzero 10y ago

aantix 10y ago

>Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. You hate where people are close-minded so you're _sticking_ with the countryside..? It's possible that NH countryside is different than the other small towns I've visited, but I have zero data points on that. Another discussion, another day. I lived in SF for five years and performed a couple of hundred interviews for the companies I consulted with. Software engineers have the capability to produce millions of dollars in profits with the right product. People can quickly get over prejudices if they think you will be able to produce that million dollar product. Keeping up with the startup Jones's is about relevancy. No one wants a senior engineer barking at them babbling about how "Smalltalk did the same thing 20 years ago and now we're just reinventing the wheel!". Do yourself a favor in the interview; do a bake off of old style vs new stack implementations. Compare and contrast. It shows your vast knowledge. And it quickly graduates you from grumpy old programmer to a mentor for the entire team. New web/mobile based companies start all the time in SF, and with each new fresh start comes the chance to wipe the slate clean and choose a newer stack that may provide a competitive advantage. Reactjs with redux right now, but probably something different in a year. New companies. New choice of stacks, all the time. The tides change quickly in SF. If you've been turned down by a Bay Area startup, I guarantee it's much less to do with your lack of skinny jeans or because you have some grey hairs.. P.S. Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45. You may have a team of fresh-out-of-Berkley-engineers and that's it. If you're not comfortable in a mentor setting, you may also get rejected. At a later stage in your career and with a young team, you're expected to contribute more than code.

DominikR 10y ago
> Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45. This is only true for startups and other companies that have small budgets or need cheap labor. If you are going after the high paying contracts you'll quickly learn that being 45 or older is often an advantage if you have the necessary experience. (not just technical skill but also social skill) These corporations aren't going to allow a 25 year old consulter to come in and take lead of a team or a product. (except if the person shows truly remarkable skill) If they hire young consulters it usually means they want someone that is cheap to hire and easy to fire.

draw_down 10y ago

> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. Mmmhmm, right. Anyway, I don't think anyone is saying that it's 100% impossible to find tech work if you're 45. I'm sure there is work, and I'm also sure it's the case that Bay area tech is different from elsewhere. But one of those differences is what gets produced- nobody is designing the iPhone outside of SF Bay, to put it bluntly. And it's important that work at that level is not age-discriminatory. I'm 35, just started at a Bay area company, one that makes really nice products and has some of the best designers anywhere. And I can already see it coming, so many of the people I work with are 25-27. The people who founded this company are a good bit younger than me. The grey hairs are people like the general counsel. Sure, nobody asked my age, and I look younger than I am anyway. But still, I see it coming.

blakeyrat 10y ago

The "Bay Area scene" is also pretty bad at figuring out that a lot of their problems only exist in the Bay Area. Although they're doing a heck of a job importing their horrible toxic culture up here to Seattle.

biocomputation 10y ago
I wish I could upvote this 1,000,000 times. This is absolute truth!
geebee 10y ago
I am curious, though, when you say "they" are importing their horrible toxic culture, who are you referring to? Not individuals necessarily, but are you referring to all San Franciscans, including those who were priced out of their childhood neighborhoods and are looking for somewhere else to live?
- milcron 10y ago
  Valley CS geeks, of course.
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
Don't forget Colorado. Texas is taking longer but obviously a larger area will take longer to pollute if you do it at a fixed rate.

bogomipz 10y ago

Interesting. Someone else recently mentioned remote working being a great antidote to age bias. Contract work also seems to avoid a lot of nonsense. There's a real irony that tech in "liberal cities" is provincial and close minded and you are avoiding that by being in the country on a farm.

SomeCallMeTim 10y ago

It's the rural countryside around here that put up gigantic Trump posters on their farms, so unless you're talking about some other definition of bigotry, I don't you can generalize "rural" as "not bigoted." Also: I have never had trouble getting jobs in the Bay Area, though I moved before I turned 45. I did however work with people who were late 40s/early 50s and engineers, so I didn't see a huge age prejudice.

Zpalmtree 10y ago
I'd rather keep politics off here, but implying trump=bigoted is a rather SF view :^)
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
  Trump makes bigoted statements. It's not a debate or a "view". It's just a fact.

jondubois 10y ago

I'm 27 now. My biggest fear is to not succeed in my career by the time I turn 40. The idea of having to give up working on my startup goals after 20 years of continuous failure is in itself terrifying enough - But combine that with the fact that I might be penniless; forced to join a mega-corporation to become corporate cattle. ... In a company filled with arrogant lucky people in their 20s bossing me around. I couldn't take it. I fear the next generation. I think MY generation is already so arrogant - We severely underestimate the value of experience. I was one of the few people lucky enough to learn that lesson early though. I once worked with a lady (a software engineer) who was in her early 40s and she always said that she never really cared much about her work. She always left work on the dot. I was 21 at the time and I had been working like crazy since I was 14 but even back then it was clear that she was a much better software engineer than I was. For me, my career was the center of my life; for her, it was just a way to pay the mortgage. In spite of what the media tries to tell us; 7 years of obsessive, passionate labour is not more valuable 22 years of 'bare minimum' labour. That's how valuable time is.

brlewis 10y ago

Could it simply be that we hear the most tech career horror stories from the Bay Area because that's the place with the most tech careers? I'd be as hesitant to make generalizations about a place as I would be to make generalizations about an age bracket.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
No, because 90% of tech jobs are outside of the Bay Area, but probably 90% of the tech job drama is in the Bay Area.

LargeCompanies 10y ago

Me too happy to work for the fed in the mid Atlantic region where the pay is almost as good as the valley and the age ranges from 30 to 65.

deleted 10y ago

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