7 ms·
From my experience working with web businesses age is irrelevant to hiring, but it strongly influences office culture. As a side note I am a front-end develope
by austincheney 9y ago
From my experience working with web businesses age is irrelevant to hiring, but it strongly influences office culture. As a side note I am a front-end developer which tends to skew extremely young, but I have been doing it for 20 years. I don't consider myself either a baby-boomer or a millennial.
In offices of extremely young teams without a lot of mentorship the big focus is on abstractions and frameworks. The primary technology is JavaScript. I get the feeling of people wanting to move really fast and build cool things, but with huge limitations around their understanding of the technology.
In offices of much older developers the focus is more heavily directed towards code design and architecture. Contrasting to the previous group the older folks feel more confident they can build just about anything and don't mind jumping into the technologies directly, however their focus tends to be more narrow as though there are a set fixed few ways of doing things. This group generally tends to treat web technologies with an utter disregard and prefers to isolate themselves in Java.
Actual fullstack people are rare to either demographic but tend to have a wider understanding of how things work outside their comfort zone.
- le-mark 9y agoI agree, what I see in the midwest is that experienced, senior developers are in hot demand. The only companies that skew young are the Big Dumb Corps with horrible cultures (overtime, low pay, atrocious legacy code). There are a lot of second or third tier universities graduating cs (or whatever) majors who don't go to silicon valley. One company here, in particular, vacuums these people up. Senior developers won't put up with that. Me and a lot of my peers have done stints there, and consider ever going back to be a last resort. Hence this particular company pays outlandish prices for contractors, even flying people in from out of state, weekly.
- logfromblammo 9y agoIs it Epic Systems? It sounds like Epic Systems. I did a stint there, and going back isn't even a last resort. I'd rather move to Elbonia and sell stolen credit card numbers.
- le-mark 9y agoClose, cerner.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI imagine GEMS and McKesson and Eclipsys and Meditech and Siemens are all so similar that you need to look at your employee ID to remember who you're working for. Let this be a lesson for all those looking to disrupt a big, heavily entrenched industry with lots of loose money sloshing around in it. But be warned: it's more difficult than it looks.
- jcadam 9y ago> This group generally tends to treat web technologies with an utter disregard and prefers to isolate themselves in Java. I hear you. I dislike Javascript too (though not as intensely as some folks), but if it's the language of the platform you're targeting (web browsers), just suck it up and use it. I was once forced to use GWT by a mindless engineering manager who thought standardizing all development on a single language would somehow reduce maintenance costs. It definitely did not :(
- austincheney 9y agoYeah, my personal thoughts on this are somewhat similar. As a JavaScript developer I prefer to do what I can in JavaScript as compared to Java, but that doesn't make Java bad. Java is actually better as a web middle tier for managing sessions and all the other OWASP goodness precisely because it is a completely separate technology. But at the same time if the end product is something that appears in a web browser you have to concede to some mastery of those skills for the sake of product quality. Putting everything into Java (or JavaScript) for the sake of comfort is so very bad.