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If one thinks 35+ is to old to code, well I have news for you. At 35+ you learn how to manage time and prioritize better. Life throws another ranch in your buck

• zaptheimpaler 8y ago
  Unfortunately these kinds of shitty recruiters and companies will always be around - none of them are thinking about lofty societal goods like family or what happens 40 years later, they are thinking about how to get the most work for the lowest price for their company. As long as droves of young people continue to flock to tech to try and get their share of the money, hiring is a buyers market. Throwing out old people or young people who dare to demand work-life balance will remain a viable strategy for the buyers and many will do just that.
  • j45 8y ago
    If there's fewer kids born today, there's a likelihood of fewer coders in 20 years.
    • zaptheimpaler 8y ago
      On the other hand, 1 person who knows AWS well today can do things that would take huge capital investments and a team of 40 people 20 years ago
      • rayiner 8y ago
        On the other other hand, the total number of programmers has increased dramatically compared to 20 years ago notwithstanding those improvements.
        • j45 8y ago
          If I had the choice to be the child of an experienced developer vs not.. I'd want to go as fast as possible and not have to relearn things myself the slow way.
        • kiriakasis 8y ago
          Why "on the other hand"? That the number of programmer increased is just to show that the industry changed and is now incredibly bigger.
      • cenal 8y ago
        True but you can roll your own infrastructure for much less than it cost 20 years ago. Smart companies rely on cloud up to a tipping point. Then it becomes more cost effective to put in your own infrastructure. AWS and other cloud providers lure customers in with low costs but they get stuck paying a fortune as they start scaling.
        • LyndsySimon 8y ago
          I agree. At a smaller scale, I love Heroku for prototype apps, and I would absolutely use them for a startup - right up to the point where I'd be paying the equivalent of 1-2 full-time devops engineers. At that point, it becomes worth it to hire them and transition away. AWS has a similar value proposition, but the tipping point is higher; I'd estimate it at around 15-20 FTEs in Amazon charges before it starts to make sense to leave.
          • j45 8y ago
            Good point. PaaS like heroku, cloudbee or even docker on linode is an order of magnitude simpler to ship than AWS.
• marktangotango 8y ago
  The distinction between valley culture and everywhere else is never made in these pieces which is a pity. I work in fortune 500s and we’re all 40+ in these companies. I rarely see 20s.
  • mcguire 8y ago
    And when you do see a 20-something, they're often kind of sketchy, since good ones are preferentially siphoned of into the valley.
    • kuhhk 8y ago
      > And when you do see a 20-something, they're often kind of sketchy, That’s not true at all and comes off as elitist. I’ve worked at dozens of Fortune 500 offices for my company, and met some truly talented young (20’s) engineers all over the world. Many don’t want to live in SV, many can’t move because of family, or friends.
    • sharemywin 8y ago
      And the shame of it all is all that wasted talent being used tricking people to click on more ads.
  • galangalalgol 8y ago
    I too work in a fortune 500 outside the valley. Occasionally I wonder why we lose so many young coders good and bad to SV. I'll then go check salaries using a job hunting site for the same positions in SV and they pay the same or less after adjusting for cost of living. Is there some magic pool of jobs there that let you retired after 10 years that I am not seeing? I'm coming up on 20 years of writing c++ and I'm not paycheck to paycheck but I couldn't retire yet.
    • pedrosorio 8y ago
      http://www.levels.fyi http://www.levels.fyi
    • frakr 8y ago
• john_of_peaches 8y ago
  +100, thanks for emphasizing the importance of family for the next generation.
• rb808 8y ago
  I agree with you but if a startup really wants people working 80 hours a week, then a family man who wants to work 40 hrs isn't a good match for the firm.
  • undreren 8y ago
    There exists no good match for a company that pays their employees for 40 hours but demands 80.
    • kiriakasis 8y ago
      As far a I understand many places pay in DreamStuff
  • halfastack 8y ago
    "A startup that really wants people working 80 hours a week" sounds like the most US thing I've heard/read this month. The US work culture is utterly insane. They say that the Japanese work extreme long hours, but from my experience, it's quite similar for big cities in the US. Sounds like a sure way to a burnout, getting fat, and losing your family.
    • badpun 8y ago
      I wonder if I'm just a lousy human being, or are these startups full of cheats. For me, working 25-30 hours a week (really working, not pretending to work or sitting disengaged in meetings) is probably a long-term maximum of sustainable effort. How the hell are these people working 80 hours a week?
      • sokoloff 8y ago
        They're not. I've done maybe a dozen genuine 80 hour workweeks in my 30 years since high school. Maybe. At least half of those were in college. People who claim to be regularly working 80 hours a week are often over-counting ("I can't remember doing anything but sleeping and working last Monday, so I must have been working 16 hours.") and often not actually working during 30-75% of the time they're ostensibly at work. Walk by the random colleague at a random time and note how much time their screen has code on it vs Facebook, YouTube, or an online shopping site. Sure, they might be studying an online course on YouTube or buying a critical piece of lab equipment for work, but more than likely they are just dicking off about half the time.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Life throws another ranch in your bucket of problems Did you mean "wrench", as in "throw a wrench in the works"?
  • bluejekyll 8y ago
    Raising kids feels like having a ranch at times, there's definitely a lot of corralling going on.
  • mcguire 8y ago
    Speaking as someone who has relatives in the field, a ranch is a problem.
    • marcosdumay 8y ago
      A ranch is an endless stream of expensive problems.
• mcguire 8y ago
  "If you have no time to socialize and network or raise a good family, soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people." I suspect that there is no "bettering themselves" going on in that scenario. That only happens if you close the loop. Running open loop is just a random walk into crazy-town.
• paulie_a 8y ago
  I don't discriminate on age but realistically someone is not senior until they have 10 years experience. That generally puts them in their 30s. The younger ones can overwork themselves, job hop, write bad code. And then an experienced coder can sigh and fix it.
  • gaius 8y ago
    You can have a senior programmer in their 30s and a junior programmer in their 50s, if the latter is a career-changer fresh out of a coding bootcamp, or with a couple of MOOCs under their belt. Age is often correlated with seniority, but correlation is not causation...
    • paulie_a 8y ago
      I understand. But typically some one out of college or took a boot camp even needs that amount of time so many are in their 30s. The 50 year is a rarer case.
• aklemm 8y ago
  Very well-said! Wouldn't it be nice if we knew going in which companies understand this? I'd like to see more companies state these ideas explicitly in their values.
  • dominotw 8y ago
    Sounds discriminatory against ppl who don't have kids and are over 40. 'work to death when you are young or raise family when you are old' is not a good 'value', imo. Your employer shouldn't have some 'values' about what you do outside work.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      > Sounds discriminatory against ppl who don't have kids and are over 40. The economy ceases to exist if, in the long run, couples don't have at least 2.1 kids on average. People are free to not have kids, of course, but having them serves an essential social function and it's not "discriminatory" to have values that accommodate that.
      • dominotw 8y ago
        So what does that value imply about ppl without kids? That they should be putting more hours in or have less flexible schedules? Why not have resonable work schedules for everyone, children or not. I just dont' get why employers have to come up with discriminatory policies for the 'good of the economy'. I would rather support a transparent 'tax childess ppl more' govt policies that these insidious "values". Whatever happened to the value that your employer shouldn't care what you do outside of work.
        • rayiner 8y ago
          Employers are part of society and have to accommodate peoples' human functions. Requiring employers to make bathrooms available and giving bathroom breaks is reasonable, as is requiring employers to provide say parental leave (even if childless people can't use it). Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing--expecting people to regularly be in the office after typical daycare closing times is a bad thing to do.
• mempko 8y ago
  I think ageism even has an impact on this generation. The quality of software produced is much lower than it could be because we mostly have young guys doing all the work. Ageism is also why we repeat of trends every generation. Our industry simply has no memory.
  • justaaron 8y ago
    this. I don't expect the hubris to cease, but an aknowledgement of the failures of hubris to deliver concretely would be most satisfactory
• isoskeles 8y ago
  > soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people I fear we are well on our way to this type of society. "Learning" is a virtue. You'll hear many people say, "I like learning," or some other version of this cliche. It reminds me of this idea, and it makes me cringe, partly because of the robotic aspect and partly because it means they've chosen self-focus and self-improvement over helping others. They've chosen this in terms of priorities well ahead of mentorship, at least to the point where they'll say it out loud.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > partly because it means they've chosen self-focus and self-improvement over helping others There's balance to be had here. You have to take care of yourself to help others more effectively. In case of learning, the less you know, the less you can give to the next generation.
  • hodgesrm 8y ago
    Not necessarily. One of the things you 'learn' with age is that you can get way more done by helping other people learn what to do than doing it yourself. It's a style of leadership that stresses building a nurturing environment for talent.
  • jacobtwotwo 8y ago
    I love mentorship, but I don't feel like I'm in a position to mentor anyone. Learning enough to be able to spread my knowledge (or the beneficial application thereof) is the core reason why I want to improve. I know that the more I improve, the more I can help others with what I've learned. Is it possible to have useful mentorship without a focus on self-improvement as well?
• pvarangot 8y ago
  I'm 34, left my 7 years relation two years ago, am gay and never thought I could have kids and am not planning on having kids any time soon. This kind of thinking about that the traits that one develops with age and experience only come about with raising a family kind of worries me, I have a pretty good idea on what I'm missing on since absolutely all my good friends from university and most of my close friends from my past two gigs are raising kids. I just don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it. I also think I can manage time and prioritize better because life did throw stuff at me, just not marriage and children. Also, if I feel like it, I can work 80 hour weeks. I just need to rest after doing it and can't sustain it for too long. I don't know if I can't sustain it for too long "because of age", or if because of experience I do now realize I'm doing everything wrong because of burnout, and when I was young I just powered through doing wrong shit when I was stressed out or sleep deprived and didn't asses I was doing wrong shit.
  • castlecrasher2 8y ago
    > I just don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it. In my experience there are two kinds of pre-kid people: those who aren't ready for it and those who lie about being ready for it.
    • komali2 8y ago
      I've heard this before, but there is something to be said about the difference between someone having kids at the start of their careers when they have little to no savings, and several years (hell, a decade) into their careers when they have high paying jobs with good stay-at-home policy, lots of money in the bank, perhaps a house. I grew up in situation 1 (teen pregnancy) and it is fascinating to talk with my friends about the different environments we grew up in and the different issues (mentally or financially) we face based on that simple comparison.
      • sharemywin 8y ago
        Its funny how much life is staked against with a family. especially if one or both of you don't have a college degree. school hours aren't set up for jobs. A lot of companies don't tolerate sick kids. daycare is beyond expensive. health care for families is just impossible. Most people don't have enough savings to make a dent.
• jwr 8y ago
  Additionally, people over 35 start gaining a better perspective on systems. It's not just experience, your brain actually changes and you see things differently. So, while you might not switch windows or pump out lines of code as quickly as a younger person, you might be able to design better systems and write less code overall, because you will know what is really necessary.