5 ms·
I'm in the 20+ years of experience bucket. It took me about 3 months to find a new job, and luckily my start date coincided with the end of my WARN act garden
by fatnoah 4y ago
I'm in the 20+ years of experience bucket. It took me about 3 months to find a new job, and luckily my start date coincided with the end of my WARN act garden leave. Compensation at the new role is about 50% of my previous comp, but I'm also much happier in the role.
- arcbyte 4y agoWhat blows my mind is how are companies turning you down? You have 20 years of experience. You can do literally anything. It's crazy that companies are so broken they pick subpar candidates over you, even at similar compensation levels.
- rboyd 4y agoseems like there's a thin line between "This person would be a valuable contributor / I could learn a lot from working with this person" and "This person threatens my own career progression", especially towards the staff+ roles
- psychphysic 4y agoHell kill it I've they're looking for people with 20year experience. But most jobs are looking for 2-10 years. At 20+ years if you're not headhunted you're kind of screwed.
- satvikpendem 4y ago> You have 20 years of experience. I've heard it often said that it depends on what kind of experience, not necessarily its length. Someone could have one year of experience twenty times, or be working in old tech and hasn't kept up with modern practices, costs too much to hire, or a myriad of other reasons for not being preferable over greener candidates.
- gedy 4y agoA lot of companies don't want or need strong engineers, even ones that claim they do. They want cheap worker bees to do the Jira tickets without question.
- treve 4y agoA less dire way to express this is that companies have needs for devs at different levels of experience. Very experienced people are going to be bored and feel unchallenged doing work that's not appropriate for their level.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y agoIn larger companies, hiring decisions is made by managers with a career agenda and projects in mind. People who will bring new ideas, rock the boat, offer to do the same task but in an easier way... Don't make good peons for these managers. That's why Microsoft loves contractors. Contractors will do what they're told and have very little leverage. Empire-building managers there can easily control their contractor work force even if speed and sometimes quality is sacrificed.
- killjoywashere 4y agoMy wife just hired someone with 36 years of experience. She is probably not getting past the 90-day probationary period. 1) Too many opinions, 2) no breadth: more like one year of experience repeated 36 times.
- seattle_spring 4y agoI've encountered this, in real life and on HN, way too much. Nothing worse than overly opinionated people with a superiority complex to boot.
- baron816 4y agoI would rather work with someone with a lot of opinions than someone with few opinions, even if those opinions are very different from mine. Someone with few opinions isn’t really going to contribute new ideas. They’re not going to foster debate, or try to teach others. They need to not be stubborn though, and willing to go along with a decision that they didn’t support.
- ejb999 4y agoI agree - I like when people disagree with me - as long as either I learn something from them, or they learn something from me - if we both dig in our heels, no one learns anything.
- seattle_spring 4y ago"Digging in heels" is exactly what I mean by being overly opinionated.
- seattle_spring 4y agoIt's not about the quantity of opinions, it's the strength for which they are held. I'm talking about people whose ways are set in stone, and if you don't agree they'll whine about kids these days or newfangled things like jQuery. Using an intentionally outdated library to represent how absolutely behind the person in question tends to be.
- ejb999 4y ago>>You have 20 years of experience. That means nothing (and I say that as someone with much more than 20 years of experience) - unless all that experience is in exactly the area the hiring company wants - someone with 20 years of the wrong experience (cobol for example) is going to be passed over for someone with 3 years of javascript experience, if you are looking for a JS developer. You probably won't even get passed the HR person if the skills and keywords on your resume don't line up exactly.
- roflyear 4y agoI work with people who have 20 years of experience and cause more harm than they do good. Experience is not a great indicator of skill in tech, beyond a certain point: like, I'd prefer someone with 2 yrs of experience over someone with 0, but not much preference for someone with 8 yrs over someone with 2.
- GoldenMonkey 4y ago2 years sounds way too junior. For anything mission critical.
- roflyear 4y agoYeah this is true, cutoff is probably 4 or so.
- primeblue 4y agoWhat kind of a rotten profession is software engineering that it dismisses more experience. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, builders, architects, brick layers, pilots etc are sought after if they have more experience
- jjav 4y agoA lot of truth to this. It is difficult to think of any profession where the value of experience is less understood than in software engineering.
- black_13 4y ago[dead]
- pm215 4y agoAs somebody who has 20 years of experience: I think I'm pretty good in my specific niche; there's wide areas to the sides of it where even if I haven't done that before I could get up to speed pretty rapidly; and there are some kinds of software work that are so far out of my field that you'd be much better off going for somebody with 2 or 3 years in that area rather than me. Programming is a massive field these days, and it's not all 100% interchangeable.
- symlinkk 4y agoOnly in tech would someone casually take a 50% pay cut without it absolutely destroying their life.
- aix1 4y agoTech or finance
- lotsofpulp 4y agoIt is not that uncommon for a household to earn $150k, lots of fields pay at least $70k+ per year. And families can live on $100k or less per year, so one partner can take a 50% pay cut without it destroying their life.
- abalashov 4y agoMaybe it won't literally destroy their life--and I doubt that's what the parent actually meant, either--but even this ~25% pay cut would greatly affect their life. It's not the nature of life for most people to live greatly below their means, especially over time.
- ghaff 4y agoI expect lots of people in tech are seeing large cuts in effective equity grants.
- fatnoah 4y agoI can attest to the pay cut being impactful. With a teen in private school, the cut means things will be comfortable, but we're dialing back eating out, canceling a planned trip to Europe, etc.
- atomicnumber3 4y agoIt might also be related to equity. I was laid off and went from a mature startup to an earlier stage startup, and on paper my TC dropped by 50%. But neither company is public yet, so who tf knows what either company will be worth at the point either of them IPO. My base pay went up by about 5%. So I guess depending exactly on the specifics, "my TC dropped by 50%" might not really be a very meaningful statement without more context.