5 ms·

Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of Elitism

by taude 8y ago

Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of Elitism if you didn't go to MIT or Harvard, too. I'd like to think more about this and write dome some elegant thoughts, but... I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way less experience and people applying their hiring "playbook" without much thought. I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers. Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. It's almost as if the tech industry wants most of the people to have two or three years experience. I've been equating it to working in Hollywood to some. Still trying to figure out where I went wrong in my career, but as others have said below, not all startups you work for succeed, not all companies you create succeed, lock-up periods, senior executive corruption (I worked for a publicly traded company where the CFO actually went to jail), etc.

sokoloff 8y ago
> I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers. > Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. Which is it? Do you want an older engineer to have the same hiring bar and same compensation or a higher bar and higher compensation? Realistically, there should be no "same bar, but higher compensation" option. If I'm paying you more, it's because you're better, not because you have more candles on your birthday cake.
- mcguire 8y ago
  "Higher bar, paying less" seems a strange choice, though.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    My experience on the hiring manager side suggests that when that happens, what's usually going on is that the experienced dev failed to meet the higher (level 3) bar but seemed like they'd be a solid individual contributor at level 2, and therefore received a SWE2/PR2/Foo2 offer. In other words, "same [lower than they expected] bar, same [lower than they expected] salary" as someone 2-3 years in industry.
    - taude 8y ago
      The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the teams/projects/products I've lead. Nor are they types of questions that even measure for engineer work experience and how they approach solving the types of real world problems that 10 minutes of white boarding a bit counting and funky array manipulations alg won't show. They are questions that are really catered towards recent grads who that I haven't think about or practice since college, and then not getting the job because of that is strange to me. Especially when they could be asking me interesting real-world technical stuff like on multi-threading, concurrency vs parallelism, performance optimization, more solution architecture are parts of the tech stack, project management, team managements, hiring strategies, dealing with low performers, etc. It's also humorous when companies aren't doing anything technically sophisticated, yet their interviewing like they are, for example doing NLP through third-party APIs, or when the most sophisticated part of their stack is using two caching solutions with Mem-Cache and Redis, or just writing APIs the read/write to and from a couple different data storage, systems, etc.
      - taude 8y ago
        To clarify about my latest alg test, it's not that these types of problems aren't important to interview, but the candidate could definitely have some input on what they know. For example, if all I've used in my real world professional career are some graphing algs, Dijkstra's variations, and Levenshtein string distance type of stuff, asking me a variation on a bubble sort alg on a New Year's Even line waiting problem out of the blue is going to be brutal and likely not test my real world abilities. You could argue that I could study up on all the old stuff, which I'm doing, but it still feels like a time suck and solidifies that these interviews are skewed to the people who left college more recently.
- taude 8y ago
  I think the older engineer can do things a lot differently than the younger. Maybe it's that there's so many people with two years dev experience now who are considered Senior level, even though they have little people management and actual team lead experience, and can't appropriate scope project, break them up, mentor people up, etc.?

by taude 8y ago

sokoloff 8y ago

> I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers. > Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. Which is it? Do you want an older engineer to have the same hiring bar and same compensation or a higher bar and higher compensation? Realistically, there should be no "same bar, but higher compensation" option. If I'm paying you more, it's because you're better, not because you have more candles on your birthday cake.

mcguire 8y ago
"Higher bar, paying less" seems a strange choice, though.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  My experience on the hiring manager side suggests that when that happens, what's usually going on is that the experienced dev failed to meet the higher (level 3) bar but seemed like they'd be a solid individual contributor at level 2, and therefore received a SWE2/PR2/Foo2 offer. In other words, "same [lower than they expected] bar, same [lower than they expected] salary" as someone 2-3 years in industry.
  - taude 8y ago
    The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the teams/projects/products I've lead. Nor are they types of questions that even measure for engineer work experience and how they approach solving the types of real world problems that 10 minutes of white boarding a bit counting and funky array manipulations alg won't show. They are questions that are really catered towards recent grads who that I haven't think about or practice since college, and then not getting the job because of that is strange to me. Especially when they could be asking me interesting real-world technical stuff like on multi-threading, concurrency vs parallelism, performance optimization, more solution architecture are parts of the tech stack, project management, team managements, hiring strategies, dealing with low performers, etc. It's also humorous when companies aren't doing anything technically sophisticated, yet their interviewing like they are, for example doing NLP through third-party APIs, or when the most sophisticated part of their stack is using two caching solutions with Mem-Cache and Redis, or just writing APIs the read/write to and from a couple different data storage, systems, etc.
    - taude 8y ago
      To clarify about my latest alg test, it's not that these types of problems aren't important to interview, but the candidate could definitely have some input on what they know. For example, if all I've used in my real world professional career are some graphing algs, Dijkstra's variations, and Levenshtein string distance type of stuff, asking me a variation on a bubble sort alg on a New Year's Even line waiting problem out of the blue is going to be brutal and likely not test my real world abilities. You could argue that I could study up on all the old stuff, which I'm doing, but it still feels like a time suck and solidifies that these interviews are skewed to the people who left college more recently.
taude 8y ago
I think the older engineer can do things a lot differently than the younger. Maybe it's that there's so many people with two years dev experience now who are considered Senior level, even though they have little people management and actual team lead experience, and can't appropriate scope project, break them up, mentor people up, etc.?