7 ms·

Show HN: NoAgeismInTech Job Board (Update) – Companies' Culture

39 points by carmenbr 7y ago

carmenbr 7y ago
Hi all, we have updated the website, adding what matters in companies' culture from experienced professionals point-of-view. Some of them also have age chart, as Monzo and Bulb
NonEUCitizen 7y ago
Your link goes to a specific company's post: https://noageismintech.com/blend https://noageismintech.com/blend rather than the front page: https://noageismintech.com/ https://noageismintech.com/
- carmenbr 7y ago
  Yes. I don’t know how to announce an update as I already have launched the website here and if I link to the front page, there will be no new post
  - dpau 7y ago
    can you append a random querystring to the url or something? i'm on mobile where the full url isn't immediately visible in the browser, and i found the link quite confusing, as i assumed i was already on the front page.
stevesearer 7y ago
I've always thought it would be a good idea for companies to note the typical type of office environment (private, semi-private, open office) employees can expect for the specific role.
rl3 7y ago
Ageism has always baffled me. In my pre-funding pursuits, I've always dreamed of hiring a team composed of top-tier talent. That typically means people who have been in their respective industry 20+ years. I'm in my early thirties and there's no one on my hire list that's younger than me. That isn't to say I wouldn't hire anyone younger than myself provided they've the skill—I absolutely would—it's just that age and experience (and thus skill) tend to be highly correlated. Presumably the motivation for the most common form of ageism is that young people are easier to exploit and abuse under the pretext of "saving money", but why the fuck would anyone ever want to run their company on that basis? It makes very little sense.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  > young people are easier to exploit and abuse under the pretext of "saving money", but why the fuck would anyone ever want to run their company on that basis? There are two ways to get more from your developer team: quality and quantity. Quality means you pay your people more and more as you grow. Grow from 10 to 20 over 10 years, while retaining most people and tripling their salaries. For that to work: - your revenue per employee must grow substantially - you need managers who are flexible, because you have to adapt your workplace to your employees needs rather than just hiring new people when they turn over Those are difficult things that not every owner can bring about in their company. The other approach is quantity: grow your dev team from 10 to 100 to 1000. For that to work you need: - Employees who can follow instruction without worrying too much about whether the tasks make sense - Employees who just want a standard job and don’t need much customization over their career - Efficient hiring processes, centered on a repeatable, consistent employee profile (not necessarily the most capable profiles) - Caps on wages The quantity strategy doesn’t require finesse. In fact it works better without it. You make coarse, aggregate decisions and let people turn over as needed. The turnover “cleans” the talent pool of people with special needs, which is crucial for the system to work. The quality strategy requires really smart management which is very hard to hire.
  - rl3 7y ago
    The funny part about the Quantity strategy is that it eventually turns into such an unmotivated and directionless bureaucratic hellhole that often those same companies create teams or even startup-like subsidiaries following the Quality model. Ironic that, in order to achieve a modicum of quality, many large companies must insulate anything potentially valuable from their true corporate environment.
  - woah 7y ago
    Tripling the salaries based just on seniority seems insane. Either you started way too low, or you're going to end up paying a lot. The developers that you were able to recruit with your low starting salary are going to end up working alongside people who came for the high salaries and may very well be quite a bit more talented. This will create a lot of friction. And at the beginning, either you are keeping your plans of an eventual 3x salary secret from employees, in which case it can not motivate them, you are promising it to them which as an employee I would view with great suspicion, or you are writing some kind of agreement about it which seems like it has all kinds of problems. Giving employees equity is a much better version of what you are trying to do and I'm puzzled as to why you didn't suggest it. - Employees get it when it's cheap and it literally represents the value of the company that you were hoping to give them in the form of higher salaries - It's not based on some kind of vague aspiration to be a good boss, it's a solid, well understood form of compensation - No new employee is going to resent a lower-skilled old timer for their equity- they earned it.
onida 7y ago
No age is min tech.
ageoldlie 7y ago
I don't interview anyone over 40. Period. Reason is very simple. By that time they're bitter from some past work experiences and have figured out now a bunch of ways to look busy at work. They also likely have more demands coming from family if they were brave enough to try marriage in the "gig economy" we all live in now. It's great that there is a service out there for those who were never able to save enough to retire before they got replaced with younger more energetic and cheaper labor. At 52, I feel lucky every day that I now have a job in management. Not nearly as interesting work as what I did technically ten years ago, but I'm also making almost three times as much money, and who knows how much more than than one of my former colleagues who is in his 70's with a PhD from a top 10 university and is working at Starbucks to help pay his daughter's $45,000/yr. tuition!
- sh87 7y ago
  I've seen bitter, demanding and unpleasant 20, 30 and 40 somethings. Also some of the most brilliant minds I've met are grey haired. Age does not matter. I hope you meet someone compelling enough to trigger you to rethink your bias. Good luck.
  - ageoldlie 7y ago
    Could not agree more. Experience is hugely valuable. Unfortunately, the way a lot of smaller less-funded companies like ours work is that we take the "brilliant ideas" from someone else (often university research but also sometimes insights gleaned through in-house interview process) and implement them for our customers. The vast bulk of our contribution is what you might call "scut work" (often the kind of thing that gets farmed out to grad students and post-docs on the academia side when they want to build a working prototype) and faster rather than smarter is what enables us to compete most effectively with the rest of our market. I wish it weren't this way. I'd still like to be doing technical work myself, in a more carefree and supportive environment, with all the protections that union members in other trades (like law enforcement and primary education) appear to enjoy. But it seems that the technology sector the world over is moving more and more in the direction of "at will" employment where everyone (except when it comes to affirmative action for certain protected classes) has to fight for their own survival until they get too old to put up much of a fight anymore. "Capitalism is cannibalism" is what one of my first supervisors told me right before I got laid off in 2002, and from where I sit today, I feel like truer words could not have been spoken.

39 points by carmenbr 7y ago

Hi all, we have updated the website, adding what matters in companies' culture from experienced professionals point-of-view. Some of them also have age chart, as Monzo and Bulb

NonEUCitizen 7y ago

Your link goes to a specific company's post: https://noageismintech.com/blend https://noageismintech.com/blend rather than the front page: https://noageismintech.com/ https://noageismintech.com/

carmenbr 7y ago
Yes. I don’t know how to announce an update as I already have launched the website here and if I link to the front page, there will be no new post
- dpau 7y ago
  can you append a random querystring to the url or something? i'm on mobile where the full url isn't immediately visible in the browser, and i found the link quite confusing, as i assumed i was already on the front page.

stevesearer 7y ago

I've always thought it would be a good idea for companies to note the typical type of office environment (private, semi-private, open office) employees can expect for the specific role.

rl3 7y ago

Ageism has always baffled me. In my pre-funding pursuits, I've always dreamed of hiring a team composed of top-tier talent. That typically means people who have been in their respective industry 20+ years. I'm in my early thirties and there's no one on my hire list that's younger than me. That isn't to say I wouldn't hire anyone younger than myself provided they've the skill—I absolutely would—it's just that age and experience (and thus skill) tend to be highly correlated. Presumably the motivation for the most common form of ageism is that young people are easier to exploit and abuse under the pretext of "saving money", but why the fuck would anyone ever want to run their company on that basis? It makes very little sense.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
> young people are easier to exploit and abuse under the pretext of "saving money", but why the fuck would anyone ever want to run their company on that basis? There are two ways to get more from your developer team: quality and quantity. Quality means you pay your people more and more as you grow. Grow from 10 to 20 over 10 years, while retaining most people and tripling their salaries. For that to work: - your revenue per employee must grow substantially - you need managers who are flexible, because you have to adapt your workplace to your employees needs rather than just hiring new people when they turn over Those are difficult things that not every owner can bring about in their company. The other approach is quantity: grow your dev team from 10 to 100 to 1000. For that to work you need: - Employees who can follow instruction without worrying too much about whether the tasks make sense - Employees who just want a standard job and don’t need much customization over their career - Efficient hiring processes, centered on a repeatable, consistent employee profile (not necessarily the most capable profiles) - Caps on wages The quantity strategy doesn’t require finesse. In fact it works better without it. You make coarse, aggregate decisions and let people turn over as needed. The turnover “cleans” the talent pool of people with special needs, which is crucial for the system to work. The quality strategy requires really smart management which is very hard to hire.
- rl3 7y ago
  The funny part about the Quantity strategy is that it eventually turns into such an unmotivated and directionless bureaucratic hellhole that often those same companies create teams or even startup-like subsidiaries following the Quality model. Ironic that, in order to achieve a modicum of quality, many large companies must insulate anything potentially valuable from their true corporate environment.
- woah 7y ago
  Tripling the salaries based just on seniority seems insane. Either you started way too low, or you're going to end up paying a lot. The developers that you were able to recruit with your low starting salary are going to end up working alongside people who came for the high salaries and may very well be quite a bit more talented. This will create a lot of friction. And at the beginning, either you are keeping your plans of an eventual 3x salary secret from employees, in which case it can not motivate them, you are promising it to them which as an employee I would view with great suspicion, or you are writing some kind of agreement about it which seems like it has all kinds of problems. Giving employees equity is a much better version of what you are trying to do and I'm puzzled as to why you didn't suggest it. - Employees get it when it's cheap and it literally represents the value of the company that you were hoping to give them in the form of higher salaries - It's not based on some kind of vague aspiration to be a good boss, it's a solid, well understood form of compensation - No new employee is going to resent a lower-skilled old timer for their equity- they earned it.

onida 7y ago

No age is min tech.

ageoldlie 7y ago

I don't interview anyone over 40. Period. Reason is very simple. By that time they're bitter from some past work experiences and have figured out now a bunch of ways to look busy at work. They also likely have more demands coming from family if they were brave enough to try marriage in the "gig economy" we all live in now. It's great that there is a service out there for those who were never able to save enough to retire before they got replaced with younger more energetic and cheaper labor. At 52, I feel lucky every day that I now have a job in management. Not nearly as interesting work as what I did technically ten years ago, but I'm also making almost three times as much money, and who knows how much more than than one of my former colleagues who is in his 70's with a PhD from a top 10 university and is working at Starbucks to help pay his daughter's $45,000/yr. tuition!

sh87 7y ago
I've seen bitter, demanding and unpleasant 20, 30 and 40 somethings. Also some of the most brilliant minds I've met are grey haired. Age does not matter. I hope you meet someone compelling enough to trigger you to rethink your bias. Good luck.
- ageoldlie 7y ago
  Could not agree more. Experience is hugely valuable. Unfortunately, the way a lot of smaller less-funded companies like ours work is that we take the "brilliant ideas" from someone else (often university research but also sometimes insights gleaned through in-house interview process) and implement them for our customers. The vast bulk of our contribution is what you might call "scut work" (often the kind of thing that gets farmed out to grad students and post-docs on the academia side when they want to build a working prototype) and faster rather than smarter is what enables us to compete most effectively with the rest of our market. I wish it weren't this way. I'd still like to be doing technical work myself, in a more carefree and supportive environment, with all the protections that union members in other trades (like law enforcement and primary education) appear to enjoy. But it seems that the technology sector the world over is moving more and more in the direction of "at will" employment where everyone (except when it comes to affirmative action for certain protected classes) has to fight for their own survival until they get too old to put up much of a fight anymore. "Capitalism is cannibalism" is what one of my first supervisors told me right before I got laid off in 2002, and from where I sit today, I feel like truer words could not have been spoken.