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> but I started to realize that pushing 50 and being as cynical as I now am, I'm pretty much unemployable as an IC. Well that's me. My theory is that it is not

> but I started to realize that pushing 50 and being as cynical as I now am, I'm pretty much unemployable as an IC. Well that's me. My theory is that it is not age that makes one unemployable in the software industry, but the unwillingness to put up with shit cooked up by bunch of 25 year old CEOs, CTOs, and the like.

popularrecluse 2y ago
At my last gig someone that my team unanimously rejected as unqualified showed up one day the following year as our new technical lead and boss. It went about how you'd expect. Much later I told my skip boss about the kind of feeling of disregard that may have fostered as he pushed me for insights. And he remarked that it sounded like I had a chip on my shoulder. All I could come up with was 'guess I was born with it.' Yeah cynical. And much happier working on my own things that are meaningful and interesting.
- hahahalegend 2y ago
  [flagged]
- aqueueaqueue 2y ago
  The culture spoke to them and they didn't listen. How foolish.
- cutemonster 2y ago
  > Much later I wonder if the new technical lead and boss still work there, at that much later time?
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
I'm the same age, and I'm pretty sure the industry has substantially changed, not just me. EDIT: and by changed, I don't mean improved. I was a huge advocate of agile and eXtreme Programming early in my career, and I even worked in shops where it seemed to be really having good results. Now I see everyone using SCRUM and... it's garbage and I want to gouge my eyes out in the meetings. I see a lot of talking but not a lot of code getting written. And where the code gets written, it's always a pile of ego-boosting needless complexity.
- tharkun__ 2y ago
  I think the issue with Scrum and agile is that it's become mainstream. Anything that becomes mainstream is likely to get twisted and turned into whatever the "powers that be" want it to be. So, while using XP or Scrum or Kanban for that matter properly in a sane environment is going to be great, if you work in an un-sane (sic) one, then the powers that be have turned whatever system you're using into theirs. This is how things like SAFe are born, that try to make "agile safe for the corporation" and of course they're nothing more than corporate BS under an agile name and that gives agile a bad name. Just like Jira is getting a bad name because it's so configurable that corporations are able to use it to do what they do. You can also use it as nothing than an electronic place to house your "post-it notes on a wall". All up to you, your cow-orkers and company. Nobody can blame Atlassian / Jira for taking the money of these corporations. I know I would if I had had the idea of releasing a ticketing system that doesn't even know that you should use surrogate keys for all your entities instead of making an issue key that can change if you move issues between projects your "primary key" that is referenced everywhere and shit breaks :shrug:
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    JIRA has always been terrible though :-) I miss buganizer at Google. It didn't try to hoist a process. It was... "here's a ticket. go do it. or not. whatever" low clutter. right to signal to noise ratio. The bug tracker in Google's ill faited github competitor was similar. Really decent. The problem with JIRA is it becomes a little fantasy code writing exercise for people who've stopped coding (managers). You get to pretend you're dispatching program for your robots^H^H^H^Hteam to execute. And write out a little maze for your rats to run through. Also was just talking to a friend about this. The original agile folks, the XP people... were explicitly against using software to track tasks. It was yellow sticky notes on a whiteboard. ON PURPOSE.
    - nobodyandproud 2y ago
      Which in today’s days of remote work, management may actually like. You may have hit on a carrot.
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
That's true too, sure. But this industry is also, in my eyes and experience, madness at times. "experience" seems to mean between nothing and everything depending on the previous company, the whims of the "hiring market", who/whatever reviews your resume and other nebulous forces subject to change at any time. I've worked with people with loads of "experience" that are not particularly good that have managed to string together a career well-enough, and I know folks too with fancy resumes and experience that matches roles identically that can't get interviews for identical positions with referrals. At any given time, what any party responsible for hiring "values" seems to change on a whim. It's infuriating. I don't have a "premium" resume, but when I can exceed all the expectations for a several job listings and I have a few years experience at a "fancy" company, you'd think I could at least get some calls back somewhere, right? This makes the prospect of investing in any software skills for the purposes of employment a total contradiction. (and yes, I understand the market is an has been very "bad" for a few years, but this kind of thing has existed since I've been doing this for the better part of a decade)
smackeyacky 2y ago
Unwillingness to put up with bullshit agile ceremonies? Yes. Will never again apply for a job that advertises agile? Yes
numba888 2y ago
> the unwillingness to put up with shit cooked up by bunch of 25 year old CEOs, CTOs, and the like You haven't seen the shit written by 50++ senior and principal 'developers'. Imagine local variables names 20-40 chars long. Then they are passed into function call, like 15-20 of them. While actually these are just 3 structures. I.e. 'gurus' unroll them into individual elements and pass. Long names to make the code what they call 'self-documented'. No comments at all. And all this is in a big project with other devs working on it for years. It's absurdly slow for the project of this size and resources. But with almost no competitors this can last for decades and it actually does.

popularrecluse 2y ago

At my last gig someone that my team unanimously rejected as unqualified showed up one day the following year as our new technical lead and boss. It went about how you'd expect. Much later I told my skip boss about the kind of feeling of disregard that may have fostered as he pushed me for insights. And he remarked that it sounded like I had a chip on my shoulder. All I could come up with was 'guess I was born with it.' Yeah cynical. And much happier working on my own things that are meaningful and interesting.

hahahalegend 2y ago
[flagged]
aqueueaqueue 2y ago
The culture spoke to them and they didn't listen. How foolish.
cutemonster 2y ago
> Much later I wonder if the new technical lead and boss still work there, at that much later time?

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

I'm the same age, and I'm pretty sure the industry has substantially changed, not just me. EDIT: and by changed, I don't mean improved. I was a huge advocate of agile and eXtreme Programming early in my career, and I even worked in shops where it seemed to be really having good results. Now I see everyone using SCRUM and... it's garbage and I want to gouge my eyes out in the meetings. I see a lot of talking but not a lot of code getting written. And where the code gets written, it's always a pile of ego-boosting needless complexity.

tharkun__ 2y ago
I think the issue with Scrum and agile is that it's become mainstream. Anything that becomes mainstream is likely to get twisted and turned into whatever the "powers that be" want it to be. So, while using XP or Scrum or Kanban for that matter properly in a sane environment is going to be great, if you work in an un-sane (sic) one, then the powers that be have turned whatever system you're using into theirs. This is how things like SAFe are born, that try to make "agile safe for the corporation" and of course they're nothing more than corporate BS under an agile name and that gives agile a bad name. Just like Jira is getting a bad name because it's so configurable that corporations are able to use it to do what they do. You can also use it as nothing than an electronic place to house your "post-it notes on a wall". All up to you, your cow-orkers and company. Nobody can blame Atlassian / Jira for taking the money of these corporations. I know I would if I had had the idea of releasing a ticketing system that doesn't even know that you should use surrogate keys for all your entities instead of making an issue key that can change if you move issues between projects your "primary key" that is referenced everywhere and shit breaks :shrug:
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  JIRA has always been terrible though :-) I miss buganizer at Google. It didn't try to hoist a process. It was... "here's a ticket. go do it. or not. whatever" low clutter. right to signal to noise ratio. The bug tracker in Google's ill faited github competitor was similar. Really decent. The problem with JIRA is it becomes a little fantasy code writing exercise for people who've stopped coding (managers). You get to pretend you're dispatching program for your robots^H^H^H^Hteam to execute. And write out a little maze for your rats to run through. Also was just talking to a friend about this. The original agile folks, the XP people... were explicitly against using software to track tasks. It was yellow sticky notes on a whiteboard. ON PURPOSE.
  - nobodyandproud 2y ago
    Which in today’s days of remote work, management may actually like. You may have hit on a carrot.

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

That's true too, sure. But this industry is also, in my eyes and experience, madness at times. "experience" seems to mean between nothing and everything depending on the previous company, the whims of the "hiring market", who/whatever reviews your resume and other nebulous forces subject to change at any time. I've worked with people with loads of "experience" that are not particularly good that have managed to string together a career well-enough, and I know folks too with fancy resumes and experience that matches roles identically that can't get interviews for identical positions with referrals. At any given time, what any party responsible for hiring "values" seems to change on a whim. It's infuriating. I don't have a "premium" resume, but when I can exceed all the expectations for a several job listings and I have a few years experience at a "fancy" company, you'd think I could at least get some calls back somewhere, right? This makes the prospect of investing in any software skills for the purposes of employment a total contradiction. (and yes, I understand the market is an has been very "bad" for a few years, but this kind of thing has existed since I've been doing this for the better part of a decade)

smackeyacky 2y ago

Unwillingness to put up with bullshit agile ceremonies? Yes. Will never again apply for a job that advertises agile? Yes

numba888 2y ago

> the unwillingness to put up with shit cooked up by bunch of 25 year old CEOs, CTOs, and the like You haven't seen the shit written by 50++ senior and principal 'developers'. Imagine local variables names 20-40 chars long. Then they are passed into function call, like 15-20 of them. While actually these are just 3 structures. I.e. 'gurus' unroll them into individual elements and pass. Long names to make the code what they call 'self-documented'. No comments at all. And all this is in a big project with other devs working on it for years. It's absurdly slow for the project of this size and resources. But with almost no competitors this can last for decades and it actually does.