> Young people starting out in the labor market often have The Fear that they will never find a job or never find a good job or another good job.
Young people fear it. Older people know it.
> Quit.
Not everyone is a 20-something silicon valley kid with companies falling all over themselves to throw money at them.
Hiring is effectively broken these days - especially in the software world.
If you're not from a top-flight university, maybe a little older, or in any other way less flashy/attractive in the job market, it can take months or sometimes years to get decent job interviews.
You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.
I thought older people are more valuable since they have more experience. There isn't much physical difference between 20, 40 and 55 year old people unless something like alzheimer kicks in, especially in our field where the job includes reading stuff and pressing button.
LoL, wait till you hit 50. I hope it doesn't come as too much of a shock. Do what you can to save up as much money as you possibly can in your 20s, 30s and 40s because it becomes a lot harder to find gigs when you hit 50 (even mid 40s in many cases).
I'm in my mid-50s. Took me 9 months to find a gig a couple years ago when I was looking. Now to be completely honest that's also because I can afford to be pretty picky at this point and I was only applying for stuff that looked really interesting. And if it looked like there was just too much bullshit I wasn't interested. When you hit your 50s you've seen a lot of bullshit in your time and can smell it a mile away. So yeah, it works both ways. There's definitely ageism, but many of us who are aged have saved up enough so we are also picky about what we want to take.
I'm currently between gigs again (previous contract may come back when they get funding so I'm kind of biding my time because that was a good place to work and good places to work can be hard to find). I don't want to call it quits and retire just yet, but I'm finding less and less that's non-bullshit out there these days. And the way interviewing is done these days... well, let's just say it makes me want to retire. I like the work, but I hate the interviewing.
>>I thought older people are more valuable since they have more experience. There isn't much physical difference between 20, 40 and 55 year old people
Older people have families, don't buy the "lets work 20 hours a day," or "we're a startup" despite being founded in 2000 or whatever, and that's a liability to some. (Another thing, is that they might be less willing to take orders from their 23 year old boss.)
My personal experience is that the very best managers use "asking questions" as their main management tool as this is effective to reveal all aspects of a situation and get employees to understand and support the decisions that follow.
Weak managers like to "take decisions" as a display of their value as a manager. This value elevation is undermined by old experienced employees who can point out bad decisions or that the manager doesn't understand the consequences of the decisions, i.e. a fear of being "exposed". Weak managers fear anything that makes them seem weak, like asking questions.
I'm very sympathetic to this perspective. If your options are:
1. Stay at unethical job you hate.
2. Get a new job you don't hate.
Well, the answer is pretty obvious. But there is a deeper challenge, which is the choice between:
1. Stay at unethical job you don't hate.
2. Damage/destroy your career and job prospects.
This latter scenario is really a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It forces you to pick. Would you rather be virtuous (i.e. ethical), or be paid?
> You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.
Sure you can. You just choose not to -- and (IMO) that's fine.
Given the trouble we have hiring, it’s hard for me to imagine someone qualified to be a median talent software engineer would have trouble easily finding new employment elsewhere. (The median interview candidate is much, much worse than the median engineer because the worse you interview, the more frequently you show up on interview loops.)
If you’re median or better and in a city with a reasonable tech scene, you are probably going to have a straightforward path. If you’re median or better and not where tech is, look for remote jobs (admittedly harder) or move where tech is.
If your skills are notably below the median, staying put and working on your skills might be the most sensible course and changing jobs once you can interview and place well.
> my age has never been brought up. Not even once IIRC
No one will ever bring it up.
Do you really think someone will take on the liability of discussing your [age|race|sex|sexual orientation] in an interview? ESPECIALLY as a reason to NOT hire you?
> You don't need to be a 20-something to land a good job.
Agreed. However, your chances drop precipitously as you age.
Studies have found this to be the case repeatedly - with very little evidence to the contrary.
> You just need to be somewhat good at what you do.
This is a vague statement that makes your premise unfalsifiable. If someone is not hired because of ageism, it is always possible to say they weren't good enough at their jobs, because good enough is never defined.
> What do you do if you find yourself inside a maze?
> Quit. Seriously. Go do something else. Ideally, do it today.
That's it, right there. The whole article could have been replaced with just that.
I've heard people express the opinion that they have absolutely "no choice" but to work at McKinsey, or some random hedge fund. I don't understand how anybody can reasonably come to that conclusion. The worst case for people like this is making only medium six figures.
HA! I appreciate your perspective and comment. I'm nearly 3 years into wall street and, while on the lower end of the payscale, I KNOW that if I pursue the more ambitious high six, low seven figure lifestyle, I will have to 'play the game'.
People who claim they have no choice but to play the game have already decided they will tolerate it as much as possible.
One way to avoid poverty in that case would be to not buy a yacht, for example. Any amount of money is nearly poverty level if you spend it all on luxuries.
Edit: I am dumb and completely missed the joke. Poe's law in action!
At some point I decided that there's a fundamental difference between working for the government vs. private industry. I'm happy doing much the same thing for the government that I was unhappy doing in private industry or for a government contractor, because it no longer makes sense to give up. To a lot of people, the maze may look the same, but in one case, it's always worth trying to fix, and in the other the whole thing is dispensable.
The maze aspect of a situation, or the immorality aren't really the important things! The thing that matters is whether you have a purpose in participating, to make anything better. When a private company is going down the tubes, there's an inherent non-linear and self-fulfilling type of behavior where people give up when they think others are giving up. It makes a large difference in what can be achieved when giving up is not an option for a significant number of people.
I am convinced that people who write things like this don't believe intelligence is genetic. You no more earned how smart you are than you earned your race.
Wisdom? Determination? Scars? You can claim to earn or learn some of those.
Don't get me wrong, I am not aligned with the hnn society of smart idiots who think Harrison Bergeron was a how-to manual. The genetic dice roll can be cruel. I don't look like Clooney nor am I built like The Rock. But them's the breaks. The only thing worse than that unfairness is the unfairness well meaning and smart idiots would create trying to rectify the inequities.
Still, I am empathetic enough to be amused by rantings of the intelligent regarding economic options when they seem to have not seriously considered some other people are less intelligent and may really have less options.
In the abstract I will side with those who declare no one is trapped. But there is a continuum.
You pretty much have to get me to Vichy France or San Francisco levels of disgusting society before I advocate a waitress with a 6th grade education just decides that supporting the evils of Cheesecake Factory is beyond the pale and worth joining the resistance, the kid's be damned.
Seems to me some of these smarty pants could create a utopia for the lesser folks who feel trapped by mortgage's, child support and other meaningless pursuits instead of wasting their horse power on blogs.
There is a genetic component, but nobody is born looking like Clooney or the Rock. At the movie star level it is basically your full time job to look that way with personal trainers, nutritionists, steroids, whatever you need.
This depends a lot on what kind of society you live in and how good welfare / free education options you have around you. In most western countries you can go to school, get student aid, and switch careers to something satisfying even if you are starting from a 0 budget.
The unwillingness to acknowledge that intelligence is genetic (as are many psychological attributes) has completely neutered any meaningful discussion on a variety of very important issues.
That's not how it works with children. Unless you have abortion easily available for poor people and sterilisation easily available for folks that don't want children... you might not have a choice. If you are male, you can't force stop an accidental pregnancy. Luckily, though, male sterilisation is quite effective. It is generally more difficult for females to get sterilized (especially if you aren't married and/or don't have children), it has more risk of failure, is more invasive, and is more expensive. All other birth control methods can fail - people get pregnant on the pill. Condoms break. And so on. Your employer might not even cover birth control.
And these things don't even begin to cover things like rape, incest, and underage pregnancy where a guardian doesn't allow abortion.
Children are not always preventable
Other folks have already addressed the medical problems, so I'm gonna pass on it.
> Most medical problems are arguably preventable as well.
That's a huge stretch. You could say that for most illnesses we have some idea how to reduce the risk, but there is still an overwhelming amount of luck involved.
(And that's before we even get into the luck-based factors that make lower-risk behaviours harder or easier for different people.)
FWIW, this author seems to use the terms "moral maze" and "immoral maze" interchangeably, which makes their writing harder to follow than it needs to be.
EDIT: On rereading, that page only offers an implicit definition of the term.
Basically, it's an organization that is steeped in perverse incentives. Most individuals are incentivized to behave in ways that are detrimental to society and to the long-term profitability of the organization, and the corporate culture implicitly accepts this.
The article touched on something that's always bothered me about the "effective altruism" movement: some of its adherents seem to think it's OK to work literally anywhere as long as you contribute enough of your income to worthy causes. That has always seemed incredibly dubious to me: make the world a worse place so you can make it a better place!
It just comes from a focus on marginal effects (my replacement at evilcorp will probably do roughly as good a job, and probably not give a large fraction of his/her income to charity) and caring about actual outcomes for the people you're trying to help, rather than your own personal purity.
Like everything, the approach can be abused (I feel fine about taking this high-paying morally dubious job, because I'm earning to give... but oh wait, now I have a family to support, and the cost of living is surprisingly high here, and I've got to wear good suits and drive a decent car or my professional reputation might suffer...) but a lot of people are sincere about it, and it does make sense.
Do you know of models of utilitarianism that maintain strict lines of cause and consequence?
What bothers me about some utilitarian perspectives is the lumping outcomes together of outcomes, based on vague definitions of benefit and harm, instead of keeping the effects strongly tied to their causes.
If you take that approach joining a company, you better know how much of the company money passes through you, and you better spend it very ethically and keep track of the development of the ethics of the company.
"Knowing a tree by its fruits" and all.
AFAICT it's the philosophical blind spot that got us parallel construction (an illegal US police practice), manufacturing evidence based on desired convictions, to reach a desired monetary, political or personal end.
There's also a New Age concept for it, it's called "spiritual bypass". "If only I'm spiritual enough, I can do whatever I want", or "if the Lord wanted my garden to bloom he'd water it, I did my part praying".
In psychological terms it's called "rationalization". I don't think it's an avoidable abuse as long as you don't do your own bookkeeping.
Lately it seems like many in the "effective altruism" movement has gone down a rabbit hole of AI crackpottery. These people will tell you with a straight face that a postulated runaway malevolent AI is the greatest threat to humanity.
Meanwhile, mankind continues gradually burning itself to death and the most advanced machine learning algorithms in the world recommend I buy a different edition of the book I just bought.
Readit News
Young people fear it. Older people know it.
> Quit.
Not everyone is a 20-something silicon valley kid with companies falling all over themselves to throw money at them.
Hiring is effectively broken these days - especially in the software world.
If you're not from a top-flight university, maybe a little older, or in any other way less flashy/attractive in the job market, it can take months or sometimes years to get decent job interviews.
You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.
I'm in my mid-50s. Took me 9 months to find a gig a couple years ago when I was looking. Now to be completely honest that's also because I can afford to be pretty picky at this point and I was only applying for stuff that looked really interesting. And if it looked like there was just too much bullshit I wasn't interested. When you hit your 50s you've seen a lot of bullshit in your time and can smell it a mile away. So yeah, it works both ways. There's definitely ageism, but many of us who are aged have saved up enough so we are also picky about what we want to take.
I'm currently between gigs again (previous contract may come back when they get funding so I'm kind of biding my time because that was a good place to work and good places to work can be hard to find). I don't want to call it quits and retire just yet, but I'm finding less and less that's non-bullshit out there these days. And the way interviewing is done these days... well, let's just say it makes me want to retire. I like the work, but I hate the interviewing.
Older people have families, don't buy the "lets work 20 hours a day," or "we're a startup" despite being founded in 2000 or whatever, and that's a liability to some. (Another thing, is that they might be less willing to take orders from their 23 year old boss.)
Weak managers like to "take decisions" as a display of their value as a manager. This value elevation is undermined by old experienced employees who can point out bad decisions or that the manager doesn't understand the consequences of the decisions, i.e. a fear of being "exposed". Weak managers fear anything that makes them seem weak, like asking questions.
1. Stay at unethical job you hate.
2. Get a new job you don't hate.
Well, the answer is pretty obvious. But there is a deeper challenge, which is the choice between:
1. Stay at unethical job you don't hate.
2. Damage/destroy your career and job prospects.
This latter scenario is really a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It forces you to pick. Would you rather be virtuous (i.e. ethical), or be paid?
> You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.
Sure you can. You just choose not to -- and (IMO) that's fine.
Much in the same way that you can jump in front of a moving bus if you want to - you just choose not to.
The implication is not that it's _impossible_ to walk away - it's that it just doesn't make any damn sense, given the likely outcomes.
If you’re median or better and in a city with a reasonable tech scene, you are probably going to have a straightforward path. If you’re median or better and not where tech is, look for remote jobs (admittedly harder) or move where tech is.
If your skills are notably below the median, staying put and working on your skills might be the most sensible course and changing jobs once you can interview and place well.
When you say "older" how much older do you mean? 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s+?
I have not had any problem yet regarding my age (40s), and just landed a decent initial offer from a Silicon Valley company.
You don't need to be a 20-something to land a good job. You just need to be somewhat good at what you do.
In my last 3~5 gigs my age has never been brought up. Not even once IIRC.
No one will ever bring it up.
Do you really think someone will take on the liability of discussing your [age|race|sex|sexual orientation] in an interview? ESPECIALLY as a reason to NOT hire you?
> You don't need to be a 20-something to land a good job.
Agreed. However, your chances drop precipitously as you age.
Studies have found this to be the case repeatedly - with very little evidence to the contrary.
This is a vague statement that makes your premise unfalsifiable. If someone is not hired because of ageism, it is always possible to say they weren't good enough at their jobs, because good enough is never defined.
Deleted Comment
> Quit. Seriously. Go do something else. Ideally, do it today.
That's it, right there. The whole article could have been replaced with just that.
I've heard people express the opinion that they have absolutely "no choice" but to work at McKinsey, or some random hedge fund. I don't understand how anybody can reasonably come to that conclusion. The worst case for people like this is making only medium six figures.
People who claim they have no choice but to play the game have already decided they will tolerate it as much as possible.
Edit: I am dumb and completely missed the joke. Poe's law in action!
The maze aspect of a situation, or the immorality aren't really the important things! The thing that matters is whether you have a purpose in participating, to make anything better. When a private company is going down the tubes, there's an inherent non-linear and self-fulfilling type of behavior where people give up when they think others are giving up. It makes a large difference in what can be achieved when giving up is not an option for a significant number of people.
Wisdom? Determination? Scars? You can claim to earn or learn some of those.
Don't get me wrong, I am not aligned with the hnn society of smart idiots who think Harrison Bergeron was a how-to manual. The genetic dice roll can be cruel. I don't look like Clooney nor am I built like The Rock. But them's the breaks. The only thing worse than that unfairness is the unfairness well meaning and smart idiots would create trying to rectify the inequities.
Still, I am empathetic enough to be amused by rantings of the intelligent regarding economic options when they seem to have not seriously considered some other people are less intelligent and may really have less options.
In the abstract I will side with those who declare no one is trapped. But there is a continuum.
You pretty much have to get me to Vichy France or San Francisco levels of disgusting society before I advocate a waitress with a 6th grade education just decides that supporting the evils of Cheesecake Factory is beyond the pale and worth joining the resistance, the kid's be damned.
Seems to me some of these smarty pants could create a utopia for the lesser folks who feel trapped by mortgage's, child support and other meaningless pursuits instead of wasting their horse power on blogs.
The unwillingness to acknowledge that intelligence is genetic (as are many psychological attributes) has completely neutered any meaningful discussion on a variety of very important issues.
What they tend to neglect is that when your possessions begin to own you, so too does your boss.
Kids, medical problems and bad luck can all contribute, but we generally have a very low degree of control over those situations.
Bad luck sure, but kids are an entirely deterministic and preventable outcome. Most medical problems are arguably preventable as well.
I agree regarding the link between possessions and employer leverage.
And these things don't even begin to cover things like rape, incest, and underage pregnancy where a guardian doesn't allow abortion.
Children are not always preventable
Other folks have already addressed the medical problems, so I'm gonna pass on it.
That's a huge stretch. You could say that for most illnesses we have some idea how to reduce the risk, but there is still an overwhelming amount of luck involved.
(And that's before we even get into the luck-based factors that make lower-risk behaviours harder or easier for different people.)
You may not want kids, but you can't choose not to want kids.
Keep to the Right at all times?
Or else Left works, too.
Just don't vacillate.
:)
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/how-to-identify-an-i...
FWIW, this author seems to use the terms "moral maze" and "immoral maze" interchangeably, which makes their writing harder to follow than it needs to be.
EDIT: On rereading, that page only offers an implicit definition of the term.
Basically, it's an organization that is steeped in perverse incentives. Most individuals are incentivized to behave in ways that are detrimental to society and to the long-term profitability of the organization, and the corporate culture implicitly accepts this.
Like everything, the approach can be abused (I feel fine about taking this high-paying morally dubious job, because I'm earning to give... but oh wait, now I have a family to support, and the cost of living is surprisingly high here, and I've got to wear good suits and drive a decent car or my professional reputation might suffer...) but a lot of people are sincere about it, and it does make sense.
What bothers me about some utilitarian perspectives is the lumping outcomes together of outcomes, based on vague definitions of benefit and harm, instead of keeping the effects strongly tied to their causes.
If you take that approach joining a company, you better know how much of the company money passes through you, and you better spend it very ethically and keep track of the development of the ethics of the company.
"Knowing a tree by its fruits" and all.
AFAICT it's the philosophical blind spot that got us parallel construction (an illegal US police practice), manufacturing evidence based on desired convictions, to reach a desired monetary, political or personal end.
There's also a New Age concept for it, it's called "spiritual bypass". "If only I'm spiritual enough, I can do whatever I want", or "if the Lord wanted my garden to bloom he'd water it, I did my part praying".
In psychological terms it's called "rationalization". I don't think it's an avoidable abuse as long as you don't do your own bookkeeping.
Meanwhile, mankind continues gradually burning itself to death and the most advanced machine learning algorithms in the world recommend I buy a different edition of the book I just bought.
Deleted Comment