6 ms·

Age discrimination in tech is dumb. I've got a dev 30 years my senior sitting across from me and I guarantee he will code circles around 90% of the devs on HN,

Age discrimination in tech is dumb. I've got a dev 30 years my senior sitting across from me and I guarantee he will code circles around 90% of the devs on HN, and 100% of the new grads getting jobs at big tech (and will until he dies). He's got a huge amount of knowledge in programming, our domain (NLP), he's fast, thorough, and thoughtful. Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years.

zimpenfish 8y ago
> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years. But cheap and compliant.
ams6110 8y ago
> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They will work more hours for less money. This is nothing new. My first job out of university in the early 1990s was for one of the "big" consulting firms. 50-60 hour work weeks were the norm. I made decent money (they paid overtime) especially for a first job, but I wouldn't do it at my age now with a family and kids.
- agotterer 8y ago
  Why is there a belief in this industry that working more hours == productivity? Arguably a more experienced developer could do the same work (if not better) in less hours. The right to not work 12 hours a Day shouldnt be something that is earned with age. If a team is consistently required to put in unreasonably long hours it’s either due to being understaffed or poor planning. Both are a recipe for disaster...
  - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    >Why is there a belief in this industry that working more hours == productivity? Lack of manager ability to measure productivity based on anything else. Between POs, BAs, business representatives, and IT managers there are a lot of people who don't seem to be able to grasp why two relatively simple to describe tasks can require such vast differences in time. So it becomes hard for them to judge if their developer is wasting their time or not (and let's not even begin on overall lack of trust to begin with), so the only fall back measure is if they have their butt in the seat and appear to be working. And even if you are lucky enough that everyone you directly deal with either understands the basics on why sizing varies so greatly or able to accept it without question, you still have to deal with middle managers walking the floor who measure productivity the same as they would in a factory. And if you are lucky enough to not even have this problems, you still have to deal with cultural norms set in party by all the jobs which aren't as lucky.
  - philipov 8y ago
    Because managers can measure hours, but they can't measure effectiveness.
    - cannonedhamster 8y ago
      Good managers can measure effectiveness. The problem is it's hard to quantify to higher ups, and even when you do quantify the data, it never beats the sales guy drinking with the boss and knowing the boss's taste in wo/men.
      - philipov 8y ago
        I think that measurement implies a quantity being measured, so it sounds like we agree on the main point. Managers can form opinions about who is effective, but the silly quantities they come up with don't end up being useful, because "mistakes avoided" isn't an observable[0]. You can't count events that didn't happen, yet such hypothetical suppositions are crucial to appreciating the benefits of experience. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable
        mgkimsal 8y ago
        Thanks - I've had that notion for a long time, but could never put it as succinctly. "You can't count events that didn't happen." Had a lowball offer from a company once - had some friends working there. I could see from some earlier code that some really basic web knowledge was being overlooked. I won't go in to details, but... this was something I'd pointed out to one of the managers there (met at a local meetup). Fixing it then would have taken about 2-3 hours, scanning all the code to ensure it was in sync. Instead, the problem spread as they grew, and it's harder to fix when there are dozens of staff and thousands of files in use vs 5 staff and a dozen files. It became a 'this has to be fixed in order to close mega-deal X integration with company Y', and it took multiple devs several weeks of full-on effort to rectify everything. How do you quantify that? "Please, take my advice, doing this 4 hours of work now now will save you >$50k and weeks of opportunity cost in 4 years". Generally people don't seem to care.
  - bpyne 8y ago
    My guess is that it's a myth that developed from the industrial era when more widgets could be produced in 12 hours than 8. The fact that developers don't do specialized line work doesn't seem to register. As people are noting on this thread, startups are their own thing. During my startup days, we were always the next sale or funding round away from going belly up. We pulled late hours to get in the latest features for our president to "sell" to investors.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Well in the case of consulting it's more billable hours, thus more profit. The clients should be the ones asking "why do you need 20 developers working 60 hours a week on this inventory system" but they seemed to accept it as normal.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  One of the worst people I worked with was a guy who worked 12+ hours and his code was insanely complex for no good reason. He rewrote other people's code over night without any review. Because he was good friend with management he could get away with it. He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team members so everybody was onboard. I never work more than 8 hours and I am willing to be fired over this. I guess work more hours is not indication of any quality and people should not be judged based on this.
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    >He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team members so everybody was onboard. Data import processes often seem to get shuffled to people usually least prepared to understand how to handle them. 2 anecdotes: 1. worked someplace years ago who would take in customer data, transform it in to our structure, then put in to mysql (2004 mysql). larger projects... this ended up taking 24 hours in some cases. I spent some time (a few hours), and had the whole thing working in under an hour. Working with a couple other folks there they got it down to around 20-25 minutes. The big secret was .... dropping indexes, importing chunks in to memory (vs disk), then copying the memory table to disk after a chunk. This was first met with "that can't work... we've already optimized everything... etc". Until it was demonstrated. 2. Colleague worked at a company which was primarily email marketing. They'd take in email lists, "import" them (which created some related metadata records, etc). The guy who wrote this importer had 'rewritten it to be faster' a year earlier, and larger imports (we're talking like... 10k emails) were taking days. Onboarding a client of 30k emails would take 2 weeks. It was literally insane code. My colleague rewrote the whole thing to work the 30k emails in under an hour, documented the code, had tests demonstrating weird edge cases... "Can't trust it - original dev needs to review it first". He (my colleague) was part of a group of people who was let go a couple months later (and was also approaching 40). The phrase "big data" was also taking hold as a buzzword around the time of incident 2 (2 years ago maybe?). People think anything that can't fit in to excel is somehow 'big data'.
agotterer 8y ago
Some of reasons I’ve seen for ageism in startups are cost and “not a culture fit”. Cost I understand, but I believe more experienced people end up being cheaper in the long run when you account for speed, correctness, and long term maintainability. The culture piece stems from the “would I get a beer with this person” and will he/she work as “hard” as a younger candidate with less responsibilities. Startups need to start realizing that it’s okay to have diversity and different cultural groups. By putting yourself in the stereotypical startup culture box you greatly limit your ability to hire and create diversity. If everyone thinks and acts the same you miss out on valuable perspectives and ideas.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Startups aren’t going to change. The goal should be to marginalize their influence and effects on tech hiring. They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do.
  - B0btheBuilder 8y ago
    >They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do. Unforunately, they are. A large proportion of the tech industry is startups / small businesses. I'd be surprised if Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft make up even 10% of tech workers.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Citation please. Startups are minuscule compared to total tech jobs. My current employer employees more tech workers than all YC startups combined, for example.
      - B0btheBuilder 8y ago
        Google - 85,050 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google) Facebook - 25,105 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook) Amazon has 566,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)), but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Apple - 123,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.) Apple's 2014 SEC filing said that half of their employees are retail workers, so let's give Apple 62,000 tech workers. Microsoft - 124,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) There are around 7 million tech workers in the USA (https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/2017/04/03/us-tech-sector-employment-approaches-seven-million https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/201...) Even if we pretended that all 566,000 Amazon employees were actually tech workers (they're not) and the above numbers were US-only employees (they're not), that would total to about 860,000 tech workers. 860,000 / 7 million = 12.3% That means that at least 87.7% of American tech workers do not work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, despite these companies being five of the richest tech companies in the world.
smt88 8y ago
A lot of people are building CRUD apps and adtech, so real skills like NLP will be less valuable (for the bulk of their hires) than being cheap and willing to work long hours. My company has found a competitive advantage by doing blind hiring and getting super talented people (sometimes older, sometimes female) that other companies have undervalued.
platz 8y ago
NLP is quite different from firms that want to throw up crud apps over databases
m12k 8y ago
I think the real value in recent grads (from a startup perspective) is that they're young and naive enough to work long hours based on 'team spirit' and the dream of 'making an impact' rather than silly old ideas like earning a real salary or a getting a big enough amount of equity to matter. And they usually don't have families to keep them from working long hours either. They'll drink whatever kool-aid the startup is based on much more readily than some grumpy old-timer.
- raarts 8y ago
  "Do you want to help disrupt <........> ? Want to work with < blockchain, microservices, ML/AI>, and want to work 16 hours a day without or with little ownership? Join us, we are a young dynamic international team, free organic lunches, free Macbook, we're all bros here. Take our whiteboard interview and see if you're a cultural fit!"
  - monksy 8y ago
    Don't forget about the week-long "coding challenge"
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    There's so much of this around. Can't stand it.
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  None of that actually provides real value though. There's zero point to overworking programmers - that's how you get crap. I think it's probably just VC bias driven by the number of unicorns which had young founders (VCs aren't after 'moderately successful startups', where founders tend to be older, they're after wildly successful unicorns). Those young founders hire "people like themselves" which naturally means people their age or younger. There's a certain degree of implicit age discrimination baked into the default hiring process of most startups too - all of those questions about reversing binary trees or implementing quicksort biases hiring toward recent grads who have just learned it and away from the experienced devs (because 99% of devs simply never use this kind of theory). tl;dr VCs cargo cult and end up investing in young founders, young founders cargo cult their interview process and hire people "like themselves".
mattnewton 8y ago
It’s cheaper to buy many lottery ticket new grads, a few who might turn out brilliant, and just burn out the others convincing them to work harder than people who know better will. Then, sometimes managers get burnt out experienced engineers who nevertheless stay, and maybe some managers form negative stereotypes about experienced engineers. This is what I have seen in practice at a former job and it seems to fit the data to me.
ptero 8y ago
> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years. I generally agree with your post, but this statement is just wrong (possibly there are a few counter-example domains). If a company cannot get value from new grads within, say, 6 months, it is the problem of the tech lead they are working for. We routinely get very useful work from summer interns, who are gone completely in 8-12 weeks. This does require organization and a little effort though: pose work they can complete in 1 month, calm them that they do not need to do it quickly, offer support if needed and check progress weekly; and pay attention -- if they sense the attitude that they are useless to the team they will often work that way, too. TBH, this works maybe 50% of the time (we get useful results from half the interns and nothing from the other half), but I suspect full time employees are not 100% useful either. Just my 2c.

zimpenfish 8y ago

> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years. But cheap and compliant.

ams6110 8y ago

> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They will work more hours for less money. This is nothing new. My first job out of university in the early 1990s was for one of the "big" consulting firms. 50-60 hour work weeks were the norm. I made decent money (they paid overtime) especially for a first job, but I wouldn't do it at my age now with a family and kids.

agotterer 8y ago
Why is there a belief in this industry that working more hours == productivity? Arguably a more experienced developer could do the same work (if not better) in less hours. The right to not work 12 hours a Day shouldnt be something that is earned with age. If a team is consistently required to put in unreasonably long hours it’s either due to being understaffed or poor planning. Both are a recipe for disaster...
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  >Why is there a belief in this industry that working more hours == productivity? Lack of manager ability to measure productivity based on anything else. Between POs, BAs, business representatives, and IT managers there are a lot of people who don't seem to be able to grasp why two relatively simple to describe tasks can require such vast differences in time. So it becomes hard for them to judge if their developer is wasting their time or not (and let's not even begin on overall lack of trust to begin with), so the only fall back measure is if they have their butt in the seat and appear to be working. And even if you are lucky enough that everyone you directly deal with either understands the basics on why sizing varies so greatly or able to accept it without question, you still have to deal with middle managers walking the floor who measure productivity the same as they would in a factory. And if you are lucky enough to not even have this problems, you still have to deal with cultural norms set in party by all the jobs which aren't as lucky.
- philipov 8y ago
  Because managers can measure hours, but they can't measure effectiveness.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    Good managers can measure effectiveness. The problem is it's hard to quantify to higher ups, and even when you do quantify the data, it never beats the sales guy drinking with the boss and knowing the boss's taste in wo/men.
    - philipov 8y ago
      I think that measurement implies a quantity being measured, so it sounds like we agree on the main point. Managers can form opinions about who is effective, but the silly quantities they come up with don't end up being useful, because "mistakes avoided" isn't an observable[0]. You can't count events that didn't happen, yet such hypothetical suppositions are crucial to appreciating the benefits of experience. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable
      - mgkimsal 8y ago
        Thanks - I've had that notion for a long time, but could never put it as succinctly. "You can't count events that didn't happen." Had a lowball offer from a company once - had some friends working there. I could see from some earlier code that some really basic web knowledge was being overlooked. I won't go in to details, but... this was something I'd pointed out to one of the managers there (met at a local meetup). Fixing it then would have taken about 2-3 hours, scanning all the code to ensure it was in sync. Instead, the problem spread as they grew, and it's harder to fix when there are dozens of staff and thousands of files in use vs 5 staff and a dozen files. It became a 'this has to be fixed in order to close mega-deal X integration with company Y', and it took multiple devs several weeks of full-on effort to rectify everything. How do you quantify that? "Please, take my advice, doing this 4 hours of work now now will save you >$50k and weeks of opportunity cost in 4 years". Generally people don't seem to care.
- bpyne 8y ago
  My guess is that it's a myth that developed from the industrial era when more widgets could be produced in 12 hours than 8. The fact that developers don't do specialized line work doesn't seem to register. As people are noting on this thread, startups are their own thing. During my startup days, we were always the next sale or funding round away from going belly up. We pulled late hours to get in the latest features for our president to "sell" to investors.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Well in the case of consulting it's more billable hours, thus more profit. The clients should be the ones asking "why do you need 20 developers working 60 hours a week on this inventory system" but they seemed to accept it as normal.
StreamBright 8y ago
One of the worst people I worked with was a guy who worked 12+ hours and his code was insanely complex for no good reason. He rewrote other people's code over night without any review. Because he was good friend with management he could get away with it. He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team members so everybody was onboard. I never work more than 8 hours and I am willing to be fired over this. I guess work more hours is not indication of any quality and people should not be judged based on this.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  >He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team members so everybody was onboard. Data import processes often seem to get shuffled to people usually least prepared to understand how to handle them. 2 anecdotes: 1. worked someplace years ago who would take in customer data, transform it in to our structure, then put in to mysql (2004 mysql). larger projects... this ended up taking 24 hours in some cases. I spent some time (a few hours), and had the whole thing working in under an hour. Working with a couple other folks there they got it down to around 20-25 minutes. The big secret was .... dropping indexes, importing chunks in to memory (vs disk), then copying the memory table to disk after a chunk. This was first met with "that can't work... we've already optimized everything... etc". Until it was demonstrated. 2. Colleague worked at a company which was primarily email marketing. They'd take in email lists, "import" them (which created some related metadata records, etc). The guy who wrote this importer had 'rewritten it to be faster' a year earlier, and larger imports (we're talking like... 10k emails) were taking days. Onboarding a client of 30k emails would take 2 weeks. It was literally insane code. My colleague rewrote the whole thing to work the 30k emails in under an hour, documented the code, had tests demonstrating weird edge cases... "Can't trust it - original dev needs to review it first". He (my colleague) was part of a group of people who was let go a couple months later (and was also approaching 40). The phrase "big data" was also taking hold as a buzzword around the time of incident 2 (2 years ago maybe?). People think anything that can't fit in to excel is somehow 'big data'.

agotterer 8y ago

Some of reasons I’ve seen for ageism in startups are cost and “not a culture fit”. Cost I understand, but I believe more experienced people end up being cheaper in the long run when you account for speed, correctness, and long term maintainability. The culture piece stems from the “would I get a beer with this person” and will he/she work as “hard” as a younger candidate with less responsibilities. Startups need to start realizing that it’s okay to have diversity and different cultural groups. By putting yourself in the stereotypical startup culture box you greatly limit your ability to hire and create diversity. If everyone thinks and acts the same you miss out on valuable perspectives and ideas.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Startups aren’t going to change. The goal should be to marginalize their influence and effects on tech hiring. They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do.
- B0btheBuilder 8y ago
  >They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do. Unforunately, they are. A large proportion of the tech industry is startups / small businesses. I'd be surprised if Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft make up even 10% of tech workers.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Citation please. Startups are minuscule compared to total tech jobs. My current employer employees more tech workers than all YC startups combined, for example.
    - B0btheBuilder 8y ago
      Google - 85,050 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google) Facebook - 25,105 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook) Amazon has 566,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)), but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Apple - 123,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.) Apple's 2014 SEC filing said that half of their employees are retail workers, so let's give Apple 62,000 tech workers. Microsoft - 124,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) There are around 7 million tech workers in the USA (https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/2017/04/03/us-tech-sector-employment-approaches-seven-million https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/201...) Even if we pretended that all 566,000 Amazon employees were actually tech workers (they're not) and the above numbers were US-only employees (they're not), that would total to about 860,000 tech workers. 860,000 / 7 million = 12.3% That means that at least 87.7% of American tech workers do not work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, despite these companies being five of the richest tech companies in the world.

smt88 8y ago

A lot of people are building CRUD apps and adtech, so real skills like NLP will be less valuable (for the bulk of their hires) than being cheap and willing to work long hours. My company has found a competitive advantage by doing blind hiring and getting super talented people (sometimes older, sometimes female) that other companies have undervalued.

platz 8y ago

NLP is quite different from firms that want to throw up crud apps over databases

m12k 8y ago

I think the real value in recent grads (from a startup perspective) is that they're young and naive enough to work long hours based on 'team spirit' and the dream of 'making an impact' rather than silly old ideas like earning a real salary or a getting a big enough amount of equity to matter. And they usually don't have families to keep them from working long hours either. They'll drink whatever kool-aid the startup is based on much more readily than some grumpy old-timer.

raarts 8y ago
"Do you want to help disrupt <........> ? Want to work with < blockchain, microservices, ML/AI>, and want to work 16 hours a day without or with little ownership? Join us, we are a young dynamic international team, free organic lunches, free Macbook, we're all bros here. Take our whiteboard interview and see if you're a cultural fit!"
- monksy 8y ago
  Don't forget about the week-long "coding challenge"
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  There's so much of this around. Can't stand it.
crdoconnor 8y ago
None of that actually provides real value though. There's zero point to overworking programmers - that's how you get crap. I think it's probably just VC bias driven by the number of unicorns which had young founders (VCs aren't after 'moderately successful startups', where founders tend to be older, they're after wildly successful unicorns). Those young founders hire "people like themselves" which naturally means people their age or younger. There's a certain degree of implicit age discrimination baked into the default hiring process of most startups too - all of those questions about reversing binary trees or implementing quicksort biases hiring toward recent grads who have just learned it and away from the experienced devs (because 99% of devs simply never use this kind of theory). tl;dr VCs cargo cult and end up investing in young founders, young founders cargo cult their interview process and hire people "like themselves".

mattnewton 8y ago

It’s cheaper to buy many lottery ticket new grads, a few who might turn out brilliant, and just burn out the others convincing them to work harder than people who know better will. Then, sometimes managers get burnt out experienced engineers who nevertheless stay, and maybe some managers form negative stereotypes about experienced engineers. This is what I have seen in practice at a former job and it seems to fit the data to me.

ptero 8y ago

> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years. I generally agree with your post, but this statement is just wrong (possibly there are a few counter-example domains). If a company cannot get value from new grads within, say, 6 months, it is the problem of the tech lead they are working for. We routinely get very useful work from summer interns, who are gone completely in 8-12 weeks. This does require organization and a little effort though: pose work they can complete in 1 month, calm them that they do not need to do it quickly, offer support if needed and check progress weekly; and pay attention -- if they sense the attitude that they are useless to the team they will often work that way, too. TBH, this works maybe 50% of the time (we get useful results from half the interns and nothing from the other half), but I suspect full time employees are not 100% useful either. Just my 2c.