I kind of feel like the author is referring to Zuckerberg's famous comment about young people being smarter. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was suitably shocking and stupid so it's a candidate anyway. The thing I like about Rachel's take on this is that she gets right to the key thing: regardless of what field you're in, or how you spend your time, the vast majority of us are going to be neither horrible failures nor amazing successes. We're far more likely to just be ordinary human beings, who probably need to earn a living and have something useful to do every day. Fwiw I'm 58 and a working site reliability engineer and developer. I don't really live paycheck to paycheck, but neither can I just quit working and go instagramming about the globe. I'm fortunate to work for a very diverse company that values everyone for what they can contribute, but I am also cognizant of the people who will look at me and wonder why the greybeard never "made it." Those people probably won't "make it" either, and anyway, nobody seems to wonder why the old Italian guy in the town next to us still gets up every day and fixes shoes.
Zuckerberg said this to attendees at the Y Combinator Startup School event at Stanford in late March, 2007 [1]
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)
"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
Chess masters do commonly mention noticing a decline in what might be called their raw processing power as early as their late 20's, but most results peak in their mid '30's [2] and some peak in their '40's. (And should spending your time playing chess be a marker for intelligence?)
But wisdom is in part knowing what is worth working on (such as should you spend your time playing chess), and that is generally accepted to increase with experience. For example, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. [3]
EDIT: parent comment edited it from 2017 to 2007. That makes a lot more sense
Yeesh, in 2017? Zuckerberg was really young when he get vaulted into power and fame, so I've always been a little more sympathetic than most to his various foot-in-mouth moments[1], particularly in the past. But Jesus, 2017 was _last year_: how is he such a slow study at this?
[1] I should not that I have some pretty severe disagreements with my understanding of his worldview and ethics, but I'm speaking strictly of gaffes here.
From a point of view, I might even agree with Zuck's asinine statement. When I was in my 20's, I had no idea how many things I truly did not know. So, in my limited "fresh out of college" way, I was pushing maximum intelligence. As the years have flown by, I've learned just how vast many fields are. Introspectively, I've learned that I'm not the brightest mind in any given room. As a matter of fact, I've just barely scratched the surface. Many, as they get older, realize this harsh reality. For me, I was probably very smart... and completely ignorant. In tech, this is inflated as we seem to rediscover old paradigms every few years, yet we look at those that may have lived through an earlier "discovery" as "irrelevant geezers". Many of could never dream to achieve the level of things that Alan Kay has forgotten, but we sure will treat his contemporaries as worthless. Zuck will get there some day. And I doubt history will remember his as a great visionary.
> I've learned that I'm not the brightest mind in any given room
I find it scarier when I am the brightest mind in a room, at least on a specific topic. I understand everyone has different backgrounds and experiences, and given the chance to share, many people can make contributions, even sometimes from people you may not expect at first blush.
There are other times though when, not so much through hubris but sort of... delayed understanding(?) - I end up realizing I am the brightest/smartest in a room (at least for the topics at hand). Sometimes you're expected to lead - false modesty won't do anyone much good there. Sometimes you're expected to lead and someone else ends up thinking they're the smartest one, and become a pain to deal with. Looking back I realize I've been that person, and wonder if I could have done anything differently (honestly don't know - lots of factors at play there).
Given that this is something Zuckerberg said 12 years ago, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he doesn't think that way anymore. (The benefits of experience!)
Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options. I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a company. I also was a "paper" millionaire during the dot-com boom. The start-up where I worked was bought making my options worth millions. There was a 6 month lock out and during that time the stock price went from $75 to $0.75. My options were at $2. Did that make me a bad developer? At another company I had options at $7. The stock peaked a few years later at $60. I never exercised any because I was greedy. I was going to cash out when it hit $75. When I left the company after 6 years, the stock was at $8. All in all, I was almost always one of the best developers, but I never made "FU" money. I did learn to exercise options as soon as they were worth a decent amount, but never made enough to be rich that way. I'm sure there are many old developers who were as dumb financially as I was.
Also, sometimes you don't make enough for early retirement because...gasp...you don't prioritize money over everything else. Some of us have tried to use our talents to do things that are socially responsible. Whether it's doing something in the non-profit space, working on a company that targets the underprivileged, something to do with the environment or anything along those lines, not everyone is comfortable invading people's privacy to serve them ads.
So, yeah, some of us are still working because we had the naivete to want to make the world a better place.
Good for you. We need more people to work on these kinds of problems. I admit that I was not altruistic. In my defense, I've given a lot to charities over the decades.
And sometimes (equally ...gasp..) because you just want to work on interesting problems with people you like -- and those jobs didn't pay out the big bucks.
It's amazing to me that so many people think that the point of a tech job is to walk away with a boat load of cash.
I got hurt from that time in a different way. the year before graduation companies was asking me if I would come work for them and not graduate. the next year everyone was out of business and I couldn't find a job as I was competing with devs with years of experience. the following year of still not being able to find work was a different problem, why hire me when they can hire a fresh grad? after 3 years I finally found an IT support position for 28,000/year. I eventually crawled my way out of the situation and making great money at a great company, but that really hurt.
when I see kids graduate now making 100k first year out of college mostly because they graduated during the right time in the right place, I am happy for them but they don't realize how lucky they are
>>I am happy for them but they don't realize how lucky they are
Well, thats the part where wisdom comes in. No one gets lucky. Some people do. But even those don't get lucky all the time.
If you are making $100K straight out of college. Just understand that its an exceptional period in your life. Be grateful and lock up every single cent into some investments.
Or when reality of life comes to hit in mid-30s. Your best is behind you, you have nothing to show for what you've earned, and whats worse- There is no way of earning it back again.
* Startup in Midwestern city. Company never grew much, pivoted several times, still in business selling storage products. If I'd stayed with them, I would have had a long, boring career. One guy I knew did stay there and had a long, boring career.
* Heavy industrial company in Detroit. Acquired by a bigger company long after I left, Detroit plant closed.
* Time-sharing startup company in greater NYC area. Went bust. Technology worked fine, sales not so much. Left 3 weeks before shutdown.
* Time-sharing startup company in Silicon Valley. More successful. Acquired by bigger company after I left. Time-sharing was clearly on the way out. Time to leave that industry.
* Big aerospace company R&D operation. That's where I got into theory. Split into several units years after I left, some acquired by other companies.
* Small startup that got big. Cashed out.
* Careful about spending, reached retirement age in good shape.
The only one I beat myself up over is hanging on to options too long, since that was greed. The other decisions were all reasonable given what I knew at the time.
You are being too hard on yourself. Your personal history is an extremely recent phenomenon in civilization where there is no guide on what to do simply because virtually no humans have ever been in that scenario. Even today, most people are unfortunately terribly financially illiterate - especially with equity.
> Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions.
This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.
Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.
Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.
You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.
Did you read the article? It's not about most people. The article is about jobs in the Silicon Valley software/tech industry not just jobs in general. Everybody at startups and software companies gets options, and a small but not insignificant percentage of them get rich. The article is about the attitude that if you didn't get rich you must not be any good at your job.
I'll write a longer post about this one day but you bring up a really good point. Identifying the very specific "greed emotion" that makes us make less-secure financial choices I think is a really valuable skill. That's not to say that you should always ignore it -- but it's important to identify it so you can recognize your motivations for making decisions.
I had a similar issue to you a few years back - I was offered a buyout in a partnership that would have put a nice chunk of $ in my pocket, but I (naively) believed that staying in would put more. It fell apart and ended up being worth much less.
I'm not sure I'd have made a _different_ decision, but I certainly have learned to recognize when these moments appear so I can more rationally understand my own decisions.
Anyway - this is all to say, don't sweat it. You've learned, you're lucky to have picked good companies, now take that wisdom and make a less-greedy decision next time.
Me too, I went all in on Apple stock when the iPhone was announced, on margin I was so convinced. Sounds great right? Well broker sold everything during the 2008 meltdown and lost everything.
Sounds like the broker had to sell everything because you went below your required margin ratio. A typical margin ratio is 50%, and AAPL collapsed by more than 50% during the 2008 meltdown, so it sounds like you got margin called.
If that is indeed what happened then that's on you for buying on margin (which is inherently riskier), and no fault of the broker. If that's not what happened, and the broker executed trades without instructions from you, I hope you got them fired at minimum.
You can only really do that if you have hundreds of millions and can negotiate with a major bank to get it done. Most companies don't trade options until after the lockup, and even if they did, you are restricted from doing so by the contract.
You also have to put up a huge amount of capital upfront to purchase the options. For Mark Cuban, this could be done on credit to the bank, but likely not possible for a single digit millionaire.
It was only during a unique period of irrational exuberance that banks were open to underwriting options for such new and untested equities.
That wouldn't have helped at all. Marks hedge would have not worked if, say, yahoo tanked for specific reasons such as discovered fraud or something along those lines - where the rest of the tech market was unaffected.
That sounds quite unfortunate for your stock options. But why don't you sell your options, pocket it, and set up an investment portfolio to reduce risk after the first crash?
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.
> 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.
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.?
I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code despite the fact that I told them well in advance that I have never worked with Ruby.
There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else. There is really only one way to assess someone's ability to write code, and that is to have them write code in a language and environment with which they are already familiar. Modern coding is so complex and requires so much infrastructure that productivity hinges as much or more on the impedance match between a person and their environment as it does on their actual abilities. Even the most brilliant coder will stumble if they use emacs day to day and you force them to use vi.
If you want to assess my ability to come up to speed on a new environment, I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
>I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
In part, because it doesn't really work for most currently employed people and may even be in violation of their employment contract. Where appropriate it can be a good approach, but it probably makes more sense for people who are already consultants/contractors exploring a full-time opportunity.
Thanks for the kind words. It's not just me, I think there are a ton of people like me out there, older, experienced, ready to contribute, but unwilling at this point in their lives to put up with a lot of bullshit. Not wanting to stomp on my humility cred here, but yes, I think the fact that the industry doesn't seem to have figured out an effective way to tap this resource is a big loss all around.
Gig to hire doesn't work if the job market is hot enough that potential employees have full-time job offers in addition to your gig-to-hire offer. I've been able to gig-to-hire for offshore developers, but never for onshore.
> There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else.
I quite liked my Triplebyte interview too (all the better that I could do it with my own Emacs config and in Racket).
> I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
Couldn't agree more; it's just not the traditional way of doing things (maybe because it doesn't scale well). It's a great way of picking a small/medium size company you like the look of, and seeing if you and the company fit together well.
Yes. And I told them up front, during the phone screen, that I had never written a single line of Ruby code, and they said that this was no problem, that they just wanted generally smart people, and that I could climb the Ruby learning curve after I came on board. They specifically told me that all of the coding during the live interview would be in a language of my choice. They even asked me what my preferred environment was.
That particular interview was a complete disaster from beginning to end, and not just because they started out by asking me to debug Ruby code after telling me that they were perfectly OK with me not knowing Ruby.
(And, just for the record, I actually succeeded in finding and fixing the bug.)
> There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else
This looks just like an Ad I see on reddit all over the place.
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for what it’s worth i did triplebyte as well and it was actually a really good interview process. I didn’t end up accepting an offer from any of their companies but I thought they asked very practical things instead of just algorithms.
The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be. Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum.
The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract programmers who moved into management or got out entirely, there’s just not going to be that many.
This is more for y’all youngsters who are afraid you’ll be put out to pasture when you turn $age-you-think-is-old. No reason to think it’ll happen, experience is useful, you’ll be fine.
Yes, you’ll find some ageist managers out there, who won’t hire you if you’ve been legally drinking for more than ten years. Good! You dodged a bullet there, such people invariably have other bad habits.
I'm 54 and have been working in Silicon Valley/SF since '96.
Ageism: One way to combat it is to have a good network. Of the 7 jobs I've had in the last 20 years, 6 of them were from personal reference (schoolmate, co-worker, friend). You don't need to be a badass, just dependable.
Work around your limitations: I'm not as sharp as I was in my forties, and this is especially apparent when I pair-program with someone half my age. Younger developers have an astounding short-term memory (or, as my brother likes to phrase it, "they have a much larger register set"). As a simple example, we have 3 environments at work, and at any given moment they're being used for different purposes. I write their purposes down on a scrap of paper to keep it straight, but my twenty-six-year-old pair keeps it in his head.
Stay fresh: I know a 69-year-old developer/contractor say to me, "2000 was pretty good but after that the work dried up — I guess they didn't need COBOL programmers anymore". He had never bothered to stay current.
Make no mistake: picking up new skills can be hard. I remember in '86 when a developer in his 50's turned to me and said, "Brian, I'm tired of learning new things." He really liked to bartend though, so I hope that career worked out for him.
And some developers aren't interested in working anymore (I think this can strike at any age). I remember five years ago pair-programming with a developer my age who wanted to reminisce ("Remember when 640kB was a lot of memory?") and show pictures of his grandkids. I felt bad when they let him go, but it was hard getting work done while I was pairing with him.
For example, I find that technical interviews for experienced developers tend to be harder, which makes me infer an "up or out" culture. A dev with 20 years of experience isn't even evaluated for normal individual contributor roles, instead they are chief code wizard or unqualified.
Younger devs, especially college hires, are given more leeway to train on the job and grow into their level of aptitude and interest. A similarly intelligent and driven middle aged dev won't be offered the same chances.
Society in general is pretty hard on older people and it increases with age. Think of the way older women are treated as “grandmas”. They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play.
I think it really depends on lots of factors. My father joined a startup in the late 90s, after 5-6 yrs the company failed. At 60 he was unable to get a new job. I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time.
I also know from running my own company with partners back in the mid 90s, we were all early 30s except one partner who was 52ish. When getting health insurance for the company his insurance was much more expensive than anyone else's. Maybe that only happens in places like the USA but it registered as yet another reason a company might not want to hire an older person.
What's funny is that many young people in the industry now would never think of staying at one place for 3-5 years cause they don't want to invest the time.
A neighbor of mine is in his 60s and lost his job the same way. He can run rings around anyone I know but he can't find a job or even get an interview.
Bjarne Stroustrup, the C++ creator, wrote a blog post about going for a job interview and being told he "didn't fit the culture" and he knew what that meant.
> I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time.
3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry. The longest I’ve ever held a job is just barely 5 years. Most tech employers— at least the smart ones— know the average bounce rate in the industry is high. Older employees tend to value stability, for various reasons. So I don’t buy your argument.
If there’s a reluctance to hire older devs, I suspect it’s because they have higher salaries and maybe because they are (inaccurately) perceived as being unlikely to know or want to learn new tech.
Shhhh, you’re busting the narrative. But seriously, I’ve worked with some amazing older engineers. I’ve always had great relationships with them, and I’ve learned so much from those kinds of people. In my experience many older engineers are much more chilled out and willing to give their time to help others.
Same here. I must say, in my work experience, I had problems only with engineers as young as me (or around my age) who had a big ego, a very bad personality or the I-am-very-smart syndrome.
Instead usually the "old" engineers who stick in a tech position were always extremely humble even if having a ton of domain and company-specific knowledge with the willingness to share all of it.
To be honest, you're probably on to something. Outside the tech hubs, older workers are common (and if you don't want to work those 80 hour weeks, you probably want to be outside the tech hubs, although you likely also won't strike it rich).
And if (career, area) is 80% under 30, any given company is mostly under 30, and naturally they're going to want to hire under-30s.
Luck is a huge part of success. It's mythology that if you work hard enough for long enough that the world will become your oyster. Sweat and ingenuity are often necessary but not necessarily sufficient means to financial gain. No one launches from the same starting line nor runs along the same track. And don't forget that all the other smart folks out there are ravenously competing against you for those hotly desired greenbacks. Count your blessings if you are one of the lucky ones.
The sad reality is, no matter how irrational is, people don't want to be around someone who is considered unlucky. Especially at a startup. I don't agree with this at all, but I'm saying it because I don't want to pretend that that psychological influence doesn't exist.
I've never seen anybody that had a "lucky" or "unlucky" reputation. Some people are considered to "have been lucky" at some point in time, but nobody considered to have a "luck" or "non-luck" trait.
In other words, I've never observed what you describe, never even heard of it
It's not about working hard, and never was. It's about working smart.
And people make their own luck. You can't get lucky if you're not in the game swinging.
I've known plenty of people who just sat at their desks, doing as little as possible, waiting for the boss to direct them, reading hackernews(!), watching the clock till they could go home. They were never going to get lucky.
Then there are the ones who are always up to something. They're doing a side project, they started a band, they go to meetups, they write articles, they talk about their investment strategies, they're planning out their next venture, and you know they're going to get lucky.
There’s nothing wrong with being a salaried person, there’s nothing actually wrong with trying to make a decent buck so that you can have a roof on top of your head and a computer with access to the internet so you can read HN daily. I work so that I can read HN (among other myriad things that I enjoy doing), I don’t read HN so that I can get more money so that I can do... I don’t know what exactly should I be doing other than reading HN and the myriad other things I just mentioned that I liked.
“Investing” is hard and very risky work that offers almost no intellectual benefits (and I’m pretty sure the index-tracking bubble will burst and create a bigger mess than what happened back in 2008), I’d much rather spend my time mapping the Byzantine coins found over the Northern Balkans (a nice way to re-create regional trade routes from about 1000 years ago) or being undecided whether the people who put the Indo-European “urheimat” just North of the Black Sea were right or wrong (does Anatolia make for a better choice?). There’s nothing wrong with holding an ok job that pays the bills so you can pursuit your real intellectual interests.
Trust me no matter how smart you play, if you are born in this world at a very vulnerable position, like say a marginal group like lgbtq communities in third world or in a war torn area or with disabilities, no matter how smart and hard you work, you are always a few clicks behind those who have the "luck" and everything else on their side.
The world is super unfair place and sometimes even if you work really smart and hard, you won't get the results you worked for.
I agree with this thoughts very much. The attitude you mention is key, at least in my reduced and anecdotical experience. It is true, however, as others say, that you have to start from a reasonable and relative good baseline and that part is just pure luck.
"... doing a side project, they started a band, they go to meetups, they write articles, they talk about their investment strategies, they're planning out their next venture,..."
life is statistics. The more at bats you get, the more likely one of them will be a home run. Tenacity, hard work, risk tolerance, and good decision making give you more at bats.
There is a second path too which is slow and steady wins the race. If you live well below your means and invest your money you will also end up with enough money that you don't need to work. My wife's private school just got a $3M donation from their janitor of 50 years when he passed away. If you save 30-40% of your pre tax income, then you will be able to retire at a reasonably young age, with a very high probability.
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 bucket of problems, marriage and children. When you are young, you are hired as an engineer to work 40 hours, which we all know very well that working for startups that means 80 hours or you are not putting good effort. Well with a family that’s not possible, as you know that 40 hours at work means that exactly. The rest of the 40 hours are meant to be spent taking care of your family.
So if one more recruiter doesnt offer the job interview, it’s because they don’t understand what life is all about. 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. Talent is not born, talent is made and it starts with a good foundation, called FAMILY.
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.
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.
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.
I'm straight and similarly aged. don't worry about expectations, but if you do, at least keep in mind you're not alone! it's enough work to make things work for yourself, let alone worry about how the rest of the world does it...
I'm in a similar position. I think the parenthood decision should be discussed much more seriously. Society does itself a disservice every time it erects expectations on people solely by sex, age, race, etc.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Sailing the world sounds boring. It's too passive. I'll be working creating new things until they carry me out in a box.
I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work.
I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoyed the crew by complaining that they'd changed course to avoid a storm.
Must have been a strange sailboat to have an engine room :-)
Sailing the world certainly isn’t a passive activity, especially if you’re sailing around the world. Ocean sailing involves all sorts of skills (and nerves) as you need to nurse a boat around while using your ingenuity to solve the challenges of things breaking that you can’t replace for weeks. You need to prepare all the food (victualling), learn how to sew sails and teach yourself to sleep immediately while tied to a bed healed over sideways because you’re being knocked about in a storm beating into the waves...because you’ll need to be back up top for your shift in 3 hours time.
I understand that sailing on the ocean is no small feat, but my problem with it is it doesn't actually accomplish anything. I want to do things that matter.
A cruise ship is basically a floating hotel. Depending on the severity of the storm, the crew probably did not want to be dealing with a significant number of sea-sick guests.
It used to be possible to take a berth on a cargo ship to/from Liverpool from/to Halifax. The modern equivalent is a ride on a container ship [1]. They will still avoid really bad storms but you are more likely to see some seas around autumn.
I am the opposite. I love to cruise, my wife and I have been on 23, many for long duration.
I like to write and getting coffee at 5am, taking a walk around the ship (outside weather permitting), and then a couple of hours working on a book project in the ship library is a great way to start the day and sets me up for exploring a new port later in the day or reading a good book and enjoying the ocean if it is a sea day. Then at night a fine dinner and a good show. A nice life, and it doesn’t have to be all idle time.
Another aspect I didn't enjoy was being a "guest", which means being treated like a retarded person. It's not the crew's fault, they have to do that because they get a lot of guests that sue when the guests do something stupid. But I don't really care for it.
Sightseeing is nice, but what gets me excited is learning new skills while traveling. Culinary classes, language lessons, local skilled crafts/activities. I never get bored learning new things.
Readit News
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)
"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
Chess masters do commonly mention noticing a decline in what might be called their raw processing power as early as their late 20's, but most results peak in their mid '30's [2] and some peak in their '40's. (And should spending your time playing chess be a marker for intelligence?)
But wisdom is in part knowing what is worth working on (such as should you spend your time playing chess), and that is generally accepted to increase with experience. For example, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. [3]
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-sma...
[2] https://theconversation.com/anand-vs-carlsen-the-age-effect-...
[3] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
EDIT: Fixed year of quote reference.
Yeesh, in 2017? Zuckerberg was really young when he get vaulted into power and fame, so I've always been a little more sympathetic than most to his various foot-in-mouth moments[1], particularly in the past. But Jesus, 2017 was _last year_: how is he such a slow study at this?
[1] I should not that I have some pretty severe disagreements with my understanding of his worldview and ethics, but I'm speaking strictly of gaffes here.
I find it scarier when I am the brightest mind in a room, at least on a specific topic. I understand everyone has different backgrounds and experiences, and given the chance to share, many people can make contributions, even sometimes from people you may not expect at first blush.
There are other times though when, not so much through hubris but sort of... delayed understanding(?) - I end up realizing I am the brightest/smartest in a room (at least for the topics at hand). Sometimes you're expected to lead - false modesty won't do anyone much good there. Sometimes you're expected to lead and someone else ends up thinking they're the smartest one, and become a pain to deal with. Looking back I realize I've been that person, and wonder if I could have done anything differently (honestly don't know - lots of factors at play there).
So, yeah, some of us are still working because we had the naivete to want to make the world a better place.
It's amazing to me that so many people think that the point of a tech job is to walk away with a boat load of cash.
when I see kids graduate now making 100k first year out of college mostly because they graduated during the right time in the right place, I am happy for them but they don't realize how lucky they are
Well, thats the part where wisdom comes in. No one gets lucky. Some people do. But even those don't get lucky all the time.
If you are making $100K straight out of college. Just understand that its an exceptional period in your life. Be grateful and lock up every single cent into some investments.
Or when reality of life comes to hit in mid-30s. Your best is behind you, you have nothing to show for what you've earned, and whats worse- There is no way of earning it back again.
* Startup in Midwestern city. Company never grew much, pivoted several times, still in business selling storage products. If I'd stayed with them, I would have had a long, boring career. One guy I knew did stay there and had a long, boring career.
* Heavy industrial company in Detroit. Acquired by a bigger company long after I left, Detroit plant closed.
* Time-sharing startup company in greater NYC area. Went bust. Technology worked fine, sales not so much. Left 3 weeks before shutdown.
* Time-sharing startup company in Silicon Valley. More successful. Acquired by bigger company after I left. Time-sharing was clearly on the way out. Time to leave that industry.
* Big aerospace company R&D operation. That's where I got into theory. Split into several units years after I left, some acquired by other companies.
* Small startup that got big. Cashed out.
* Careful about spending, reached retirement age in good shape.
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Sad that cashing out may have ejected "staying and contributing" as a measure of success and indicator of worth.
This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.
Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.
Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.
You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.
I had a similar issue to you a few years back - I was offered a buyout in a partnership that would have put a nice chunk of $ in my pocket, but I (naively) believed that staying in would put more. It fell apart and ended up being worth much less.
I'm not sure I'd have made a _different_ decision, but I certainly have learned to recognize when these moments appear so I can more rationally understand my own decisions.
Anyway - this is all to say, don't sweat it. You've learned, you're lucky to have picked good companies, now take that wisdom and make a less-greedy decision next time.
If that is indeed what happened then that's on you for buying on margin (which is inherently riskier), and no fault of the broker. If that's not what happened, and the broker executed trades without instructions from you, I hope you got them fired at minimum.
You also have to put up a huge amount of capital upfront to purchase the options. For Mark Cuban, this could be done on credit to the bank, but likely not possible for a single digit millionaire.
It was only during a unique period of irrational exuberance that banks were open to underwriting options for such new and untested equities.
We think about market risk and forget about the downside risk imposed by neglect, fraud and incompetence.
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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.
> 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.
There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else. There is really only one way to assess someone's ability to write code, and that is to have them write code in a language and environment with which they are already familiar. Modern coding is so complex and requires so much infrastructure that productivity hinges as much or more on the impedance match between a person and their environment as it does on their actual abilities. Even the most brilliant coder will stumble if they use emacs day to day and you force them to use vi.
If you want to assess my ability to come up to speed on a new environment, I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
In part, because it doesn't really work for most currently employed people and may even be in violation of their employment contract. Where appropriate it can be a good approach, but it probably makes more sense for people who are already consultants/contractors exploring a full-time opportunity.
By the way I'm a big fan of your work, and seriously envy the quality of projects you've worked. Especially your work at NASA using Common Lisp.
You sound so humble. But I'm sure a lot of people(including me) here on HN aspire to be somebody like you.
I quite liked my Triplebyte interview too (all the better that I could do it with my own Emacs config and in Racket).
Couldn't agree more; it's just not the traditional way of doing things (maybe because it doesn't scale well). It's a great way of picking a small/medium size company you like the look of, and seeing if you and the company fit together well.
Were you applying to a place that writes a ton of Ruby?
That particular interview was a complete disaster from beginning to end, and not just because they started out by asking me to debug Ruby code after telling me that they were perfectly OK with me not knowing Ruby.
(And, just for the record, I actually succeeded in finding and fixing the bug.)
This looks just like an Ad I see on reddit all over the place.
If you're worried about abuse, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. The guidelines say that too. Would you mind reading them and following them when posting here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Disclosure: I have a friend at Triplebyte)
Get off my lawn.
The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract programmers who moved into management or got out entirely, there’s just not going to be that many.
This is more for y’all youngsters who are afraid you’ll be put out to pasture when you turn $age-you-think-is-old. No reason to think it’ll happen, experience is useful, you’ll be fine.
Yes, you’ll find some ageist managers out there, who won’t hire you if you’ve been legally drinking for more than ten years. Good! You dodged a bullet there, such people invariably have other bad habits.
Ageism: One way to combat it is to have a good network. Of the 7 jobs I've had in the last 20 years, 6 of them were from personal reference (schoolmate, co-worker, friend). You don't need to be a badass, just dependable.
Work around your limitations: I'm not as sharp as I was in my forties, and this is especially apparent when I pair-program with someone half my age. Younger developers have an astounding short-term memory (or, as my brother likes to phrase it, "they have a much larger register set"). As a simple example, we have 3 environments at work, and at any given moment they're being used for different purposes. I write their purposes down on a scrap of paper to keep it straight, but my twenty-six-year-old pair keeps it in his head.
Stay fresh: I know a 69-year-old developer/contractor say to me, "2000 was pretty good but after that the work dried up — I guess they didn't need COBOL programmers anymore". He had never bothered to stay current.
Make no mistake: picking up new skills can be hard. I remember in '86 when a developer in his 50's turned to me and said, "Brian, I'm tired of learning new things." He really liked to bartend though, so I hope that career worked out for him.
And some developers aren't interested in working anymore (I think this can strike at any age). I remember five years ago pair-programming with a developer my age who wanted to reminisce ("Remember when 640kB was a lot of memory?") and show pictures of his grandkids. I felt bad when they let him go, but it was hard getting work done while I was pairing with him.
Younger devs, especially college hires, are given more leeway to train on the job and grow into their level of aptitude and interest. A similarly intelligent and driven middle aged dev won't be offered the same chances.
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I also know from running my own company with partners back in the mid 90s, we were all early 30s except one partner who was 52ish. When getting health insurance for the company his insurance was much more expensive than anyone else's. Maybe that only happens in places like the USA but it registered as yet another reason a company might not want to hire an older person.
A neighbor of mine is in his 60s and lost his job the same way. He can run rings around anyone I know but he can't find a job or even get an interview.
Bjarne Stroustrup, the C++ creator, wrote a blog post about going for a job interview and being told he "didn't fit the culture" and he knew what that meant.
3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry. The longest I’ve ever held a job is just barely 5 years. Most tech employers— at least the smart ones— know the average bounce rate in the industry is high. Older employees tend to value stability, for various reasons. So I don’t buy your argument.
If there’s a reluctance to hire older devs, I suspect it’s because they have higher salaries and maybe because they are (inaccurately) perceived as being unlikely to know or want to learn new tech.
Instead usually the "old" engineers who stick in a tech position were always extremely humble even if having a ton of domain and company-specific knowledge with the willingness to share all of it.
I love working where there is a mix of young and old, where they get along.
And if (career, area) is 80% under 30, any given company is mostly under 30, and naturally they're going to want to hire under-30s.
I think we are talking about 45 yr old with 2 kids and a mortgage.
The sad reality is, no matter how irrational is, people don't want to be around someone who is considered unlucky. Especially at a startup. I don't agree with this at all, but I'm saying it because I don't want to pretend that that psychological influence doesn't exist.
In other words, I've never observed what you describe, never even heard of it
And people make their own luck. You can't get lucky if you're not in the game swinging.
I've known plenty of people who just sat at their desks, doing as little as possible, waiting for the boss to direct them, reading hackernews(!), watching the clock till they could go home. They were never going to get lucky.
Then there are the ones who are always up to something. They're doing a side project, they started a band, they go to meetups, they write articles, they talk about their investment strategies, they're planning out their next venture, and you know they're going to get lucky.
“Investing” is hard and very risky work that offers almost no intellectual benefits (and I’m pretty sure the index-tracking bubble will burst and create a bigger mess than what happened back in 2008), I’d much rather spend my time mapping the Byzantine coins found over the Northern Balkans (a nice way to re-create regional trade routes from about 1000 years ago) or being undecided whether the people who put the Indo-European “urheimat” just North of the Black Sea were right or wrong (does Anatolia make for a better choice?). There’s nothing wrong with holding an ok job that pays the bills so you can pursuit your real intellectual interests.
The world is super unfair place and sometimes even if you work really smart and hard, you won't get the results you worked for.
"Working smart"?
There is a second path too which is slow and steady wins the race. If you live well below your means and invest your money you will also end up with enough money that you don't need to work. My wife's private school just got a $3M donation from their janitor of 50 years when he passed away. If you save 30-40% of your pre tax income, then you will be able to retire at a reasonably young age, with a very high probability.
So if one more recruiter doesnt offer the job interview, it’s because they don’t understand what life is all about. 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. Talent is not born, talent is made and it starts with a good foundation, called FAMILY.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
The younger ones can overwork themselves, job hop, write bad code. And then an experienced coder can sigh and fix it.
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.
Did you mean "wrench", as in "throw a wrench in the works"?
'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.
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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.
I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work.
I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoyed the crew by complaining that they'd changed course to avoid a storm.
Sailing the world certainly isn’t a passive activity, especially if you’re sailing around the world. Ocean sailing involves all sorts of skills (and nerves) as you need to nurse a boat around while using your ingenuity to solve the challenges of things breaking that you can’t replace for weeks. You need to prepare all the food (victualling), learn how to sew sails and teach yourself to sleep immediately while tied to a bed healed over sideways because you’re being knocked about in a storm beating into the waves...because you’ll need to be back up top for your shift in 3 hours time.
Whatever floats your boat, though :-)
He wasn't talking about a sailboat, but anyway any sailboat built for ocean passages will have a diesel auxillary.
It used to be possible to take a berth on a cargo ship to/from Liverpool from/to Halifax. The modern equivalent is a ride on a container ship [1]. They will still avoid really bad storms but you are more likely to see some seas around autumn.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/cruises/news/french-freig...
I like to write and getting coffee at 5am, taking a walk around the ship (outside weather permitting), and then a couple of hours working on a book project in the ship library is a great way to start the day and sets me up for exploring a new port later in the day or reading a good book and enjoying the ocean if it is a sea day. Then at night a fine dinner and a good show. A nice life, and it doesn’t have to be all idle time.
Another aspect I didn't enjoy was being a "guest", which means being treated like a retarded person. It's not the crew's fault, they have to do that because they get a lot of guests that sue when the guests do something stupid. But I don't really care for it.
You don't have to be idle while you're traveling. I always spend a few hours "working" when I travel. I find it too tiring to be out all day anyway.
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