You can have a younger picture, you can remove older jobs on your resume to appear younger. It gets you the interview, you can pass the coding test but then get told that they don't think you're a 'cultural fit'.
I think the underlying reason is when you have far more experience than your future boss they are intimidated by you.
I'm an engineering manager in my 40s and I've hired engineers older than me.
I appreciate you're absolutely correct, age discrimination does happen. One thing to consider for older engineers is that, though your technical expertise improves through the decades, it's not just technologies that you have to keep up with but also cultural practices. That is, the bad culture fit isn't necessarily code for "We don't want you because you're old." but could be a genuine reason.
As an example, consider the book The Phoenix Project which dissects the reasons for discarding segregation of roles like developers, QA, and ops in separate teams into service teams of DevOps / T-shaped engineers. If you haven't worked in that environment or don't appreciate the difference, you may be judged accordingly.
> I think the underlying reason is when you have far more experience than your future boss they are intimidated by you.
That is so true; however, they tend to be weak managers with delicate egos and poor vision. Count yourself lucky you didn't waste your time.
There are plenty of managers who highly value experience and capability regardless of age. They are worth searching for. Such a manager's project is probably also more challenging and interesting.
It's really an issue with ego in organizational structures and power. I've managed people far more experienced or skilled in areas than me. It simply requires you to realize you're not inherently 'superior' to the people you manage, just that you're managing (i.e. manager) highly skilled people to solve problems.
Recognize when to trust people and do just that--you know they're awesome, they know they're awesome, why not take advantage of that and build on it to create something more awesome? Learn to be wrong or make bad management decisions out of ignorance and accept when experienced people suggest or tell you otherwise--they may even give you a way out of a mess you created. Skilled people with that sort of experience often aren't trying to correct you to insult you, they're trying to help you, the team, and themselves by offering their wealth of experience and knowledge.
It's when experienced people like this are quiet is when you should really be worried. If they aren't making suggestions, unless you're sure of yourself, you've likely created or been subjected to an environment experienced individuals have given up on improving and are now in death marches on your project efforts, quietly updating their resumes and awakening their contacts, looking for new positions.
Even younger picture cannot help those who are facing prejudice due to visible disability, deformity or racism.
Biases due to profile picture adversely affecting marginalized is not new, Airbnb's black guests and owners have documented this under #AirbnbWhileBlack forcing the company to make several changes to how profile pictures and user names work.
But LinkedIn never acknowledged these issues and has instead doubled down on visual identity now like having 'Video introduction' as a primary feature. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce 'Upload your video to Sign in'[2].
> It gets you the interview, you can pass the coding test but then get told that they don't think you're a 'cultural fit'.
a recent AMZN innovation to optimize that process out - an explicitly stated max years of experience cap that thus effectively bars you even from applying (previous post with some replies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786601 )
You may be willing and qualified, yet because of age you can't even apply. Feels just nice.
The most consistent pattern I have observed as an older developer with some years on a resume is absolute utter astonishment when I don't want to waste time on a bunch of confused newb shit like sickly bloated frameworks with a million dependencies. Its weird to hear people acknowledge that I have just so much experience on paper and yet be so amazingly dumbfounded surprised that I would be focused on less junior things.
I haven't yet found the proper words to converse through that, but a team of similarly older developers sharing similar concerns adds tremendous value.
omg yes. i've taken way to many jobs where, after alot of very considered discussion about the kind of work i do, and how I dont consider generic devops worth the time. happy to debug our code in production, but i'm not first line support or software install/configure.
yes, they assure me, they really want a software developer in the classic sense. this is an absolutely perfect fit.
and when I show up? welcome to the team, why dont you shadow joe who is going to be upgrading Kafka kafka this week.. at Google they actually pointed me at the nightly error queue for some AI pipeline and told me my job for the next 6 months was going to be pulling out the errors and manually fixing the input until it passes.
the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. so much so they dont even know what it looks like.
"the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. "
No offense, that kind of seems to be your issue, not theirs.
In large orgs if there are 10 'technical but not really dev roles' for ever 2 devs ... that's the reality of the world we live in.
It's maybe 'sad' that we call can't write code, but that's maybe not quite an 'industry' problem.
On the other hand, using giant fragile stacks with a million dependencies and systems that are an 'inherent mess' ... well that's maybe a little bit different and motivation is different because you might be actually wasting your time.
But in reality there is a ton of work to be done and most of it is not glamorous.
As an engineer with more than 15 years professional experience, my definition of "junior shit" would be thinking you can hand-roll a foundation or framework better than something that already exists.
If the existing framework is so great, why does it keep getting replaced with a new framework? Why aren’t we all still on Angular?
And if we all keep hiring only the best candidates, why would we think that they can’t write a better framework? somebody is writing a better framework.
I have this on my list of questions I ask interviewers. I should follow-up with "how much of your budget is dedicated to this?" Major red flag if they don't even know how much catering to their NIH syndrome currently costs them.
That reminds me of people comparing writing in JavaScript (without their pet abstraction library) to writing in assembly. What a bunch of horse shit. It’s a red flag to self-identify configuration monkeys (people limited to following instructions) apart from those that can actually write and test applications.
This rule about absolute failure in rolling your own realistically only applies to cryptography, because the bar there is set extremely high and there is a rigorous vetting process.
> As an engineer with more than 15 years professional experience, my definition of "junior shit" would be thinking you can hand-roll a foundation or framework better than something that already exists.
You're not wrong, although to be fair, it isn't always about hand-rolling a framework. Sometimes it's just about experience and knowledge about which existing framework might best fit a given use case (without unnecessary bloat) as opposed to just choosing the latest "ooh shiny!" bloated buzzword framework to build upon purely because it's new and trendy this week.
Although some use cases do call for the "bloated" framework, because feature requirements demand using a framework that provides those features. Again, experience and knowledge can inform whether this is necessarily the case, and one should obviously avoid hiring any applicant who does not see a valid need for the choice of framework/toolchain when it was chosen for good reason.
The most senior engineer I’ve met had a refreshing attitude that clicked with me.
“It’s just typing. Typey typey type.”
I take that to mean, no matter the code base, no matter the questionable choices made historically and that will be made in the future, the job doesn’t change.
Figure out the requirements, grind until they’re met.
Who cares what the stack is and how many layers of libraries there are? If that becomes a problem we will fix it.
But how much typing, how much staring at screens, how many meetings are needed to reach your actual goals? I care about the choices bc the wrong ones create problems which require more typing, or typing at night. "The job doesn't change" except the amount of time and effort required to do something useful can change.
>Who cares what the stack is and how many layers of libraries there are?
Exactly.
Can I get on with this person who will be my boss and these other people who I will sit next to for eight hours a day? Do I prefer JavaScript or Python?
One of those questions is much more important than the other.
I'm not even that old, but a pattern I noticed when I've interviewed in the past couple years is that maybe I'm applying for the wrong jobs because my would-be peers ask questions that seem irrelevant and seem confused that I don't have answers ready for "what frameworks do you use? Which languages do you like? etc.", but then I get in an interview with someone who would be above me and we have a great chat about architecture and design and things that are actually relevant.
I'm here to build a house, I want to talk about the architecture of structural design of it. I don't care what brand air nailer you guys use.
My company has a kind of cultural disease where everyone aspires to be an architecture astronaut, people with an ounce of talent or ambition learn to treat code as beneath them, consequently we get beautiful design docs and a garbage codebase. For that reason I would fail any candidate who displayed this attitude. I expect senior candidates to raise the bar on quality and craftsmanship in implementation, and I’ve met plenty who do. YMMV.
I don’t think being a framework partisan is a particularly good sign, but at least it shows you have some experience and reflection and taste with regard to the tensions involved in making things that run.
I have the exact same experience. Many would-be peers simply don't get it when I have very little interest in the type of framework or language they use. They take it as a sign that I cannot contribute to the team readily even though they acknowledge I have more experience.
Ecosystem matters a lot. For example, React might be overkill for a lot of projects but it’s relatively easy to hire for and there are a lot of drop-in tools and components available.
Not sure what kind of work you do but whenever I hear frontend devs don't use a framework/view library I have a difficult time taking them seriously. More often than not that means they're using some mess of a pseudo-framework that they created themselves.
When you now have things like TypeScript that allow you to define interfaces completely external from your logic you have already addressed half of what frameworks solve for without writing a single line of code. After that the only things left that frameworks provide are APIs and composition. If you know what you are doing you define your APIs first in consideration for the business logic and save composition for the final step after all other logic is written. Then you can make any adjustments to your internal APIs as necessary to glue things together. No framework is needed, minimal refactoring, and a smaller code base with less complexity because a generic framework doesn’t know your business requirements in advance.
> “A younger-looking face creates impressions of higher physical and mental fitness,” the authors write. “Our results suggest that these impressions may indeed be a powerful driver of favorable employment outcomes.”
It is possible that there are other explanations. Older developers may want better salaries, better working conditions, be harder to manipulate, etc.
Good leadership is going to hire people that fits in the culture of the company and have the needed skills. Whenever the candidate is younger or older does not matter.
Bad leadership wants cheap employees that obey orders and don't challenge authority. Younger, more inexperienced developers will fit this category, even if they are technically skilled.
This is as good a theory that any other one to explain the fact that recruiters want younger developers.
> better salaries, better working conditions, be harder to manipulate
That's me. I only 36 and I absolutely do not buy the corporate bullshit that someone's product is going to "change the world" through some incremental improvement of some software as a service. I am strongly against exploitative business models. And I know how much I am worth. When interviewing I like to give the CEO a little push back and see how they respond. I'm not going to work for someone who gets flustered when I question their thinking.
I will however provide a lot of value for a team I am comfortable with.
Nothing else in the resume changed, though. Just the picture. The age was still listed truthfully, demands didn't change, and the experience was the same.
If bad leadership wanted cheap employees, that is easily filtered by hiring folks with less experience (for example) because those folks tend to be younger.
I'm kinda with you there. There are more jobs for junior developers, and higher salaries for senior ones. That kinda correlates with age too. If I see someone 60 in tech, I assume they're either:
- A wizard, who spent 40 years knee-deep in technology.
- Someone with management experience.
- A flake-out who never did either.
I'm also less likely to cold-call someone more intimidating for random job screening, but more likely to reach out for something aligned to their skill set.
For front-end dev - some older developers are really tired of the constant churn. This can be a good thing if you can / already are off the endless new frontend bandwagon. But since a lot of junior folks are into the "latest and greatest" it can be very hard internally (and cement a perhaps resistance to change stereotype).
I'm a bit tired of folks saying older devs are not resistant to change. Reality - with experience some stuff just seems faddy at times over the course of longer career arcs. So yes, older devs can be bit resistant to jumping onto the latest bandwagon.
If someone learned lisp (or ML) in the 80s, very little from the “cutting edge” of languages would seem new at all. Likewise, most current framework trends have been around for decades.
I think the Junior mistake is searching for a programming panacea. While lots of bad designs exist, perfect designs do not.
Exactly this - people spend more time talking about frameworks than solving problems sometimes - the framework will not solve it and people have built huge / successful apps w rudimentary stack
Do you think the fads will come and go with lower frequency as more time passes? Software engineering is a young field. I don't hear a lot about, for instance, fads in aerospace engineering but that could be because I hear little about it in general. Perhaps software engineering is always going to be "faddy" because of how flexible and reconfigurable software is in general.
I think it’s the latter. Aerospace engineers do have fads like the aerospike rocket engine. Nobody’s launched one (that I know of) because it simply doesn’t work yet. The cost of failure is just too catastrophic. Instead, there’s a focus on the tradeoffs and lots of experimentation to get it right.
In software, if the prototype didn’t work, you tweak it and try again or even deploy with known issues and fix in prod later (looking at you game companies). If you had to throw away all your code and start over completely with each iteration like you do with rockets, you’d see more discussion and testing out earlier (in fact, you tend to see this more in critical software —- eg, the software that controls those rockets).
Finally, very few companies throw as much money behind business software as they do at rockets. I’d bet heavily that v8, .net, hotspot, or even gcc (metaphorical engines for your code) have only a fraction of the resources spent on a new rocket design.
One thing - software engineering is harder to measure than hardware. Have a new wing design ? Amazing strength at low weight - you can actually test your design and measure if it’s better.
That seems like something that would already be reflected on people's resumes, so it seems odd that a different photo would make a difference if that's the concern.
I'm just now coming out of my not-junior-but-not-senior period of overengineering and wish there were more older devs in my shop to consort with instead of a bunch of other not-junior-but-not-quite-senior devs (if we're being serious and not using senior to mean "I've just been doing this a long time" instead of "I've been doing thing a long time and I've learned from my experiences and here's what specifically").
55 year old software engineer , with extensive RF/analog background with dual EE/CE degrees. I can’t begin to count the number of interviews gleaned from LinkedIn where the first 45 minutes of the interview was a late 20’s early 30’s person telling me all about their wonderful work and how great they are. Not a word about the job, nothing about the company, all about them and the places they’ve worked, what they have done. Just who the hell is being interviewed? When this happens, it is all I can do not to walk out of the interview or kill the call/Zoom session.
The moment some places figure out you’re over 45, it is over. Except for very forward looking start-ups who want to grow very quickly.
That is where I have been working for the past 10 years..best time of my life. But I also know, this is my last employer.
I had an interview for a "digital interactive agency" where a 24-year-old lectured me this and that and how great she was. She was flabbergasted to find out I had more people working under me than were in her entire company.
At the end of all this she says--"Do you think you are ready to step up to X quality?"
I had just finished my yearly reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), and I was pretty annoyed with her, so I asked, "How do you define quality?"
ZAMM is about a philosophy called the metaphysics of quality-- I knew that no matter what she said, I would have an advanced argument from ZAMM to belittle her with (the interview was just a formality at this point).
She replied, "Hmmm, I'll have to think about that." And I never heard from this individual or agency again.
I would like to think that day she learned not to say stupid things. Not to insult people over when you really don't even know what you're saying.
I realize replying to yourself demonstrates poor taste... But I'd like to add that at the time of the interview I had software I had personally designed at companies like DirecTV, Samsung, LG, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Google and Applied Materials. I literally had products at Crestron, Denon and Monster, and one product that could be purchased nationally at Best Buy.
I don't know how many offers other people are getting, but I'm 52 and I get on average about 8 messages from recruiters every day. Maybe that's because I look younger in my profile picture... :D
>I don't know how many offers other people are getting, but I'm 52 and I get on average about 8 messages from recruiters every day. Maybe that's because I look younger in my profile picture... :D
Messages from recruiters !== job offers. These things are completely automated and generated by AI at this point. I get dozens a week, and the rare one or two I respond to are met with total silence as they are being sent to thousands of people.
Mid 40s. I get about 3 per week. A few years ago it was a lot more. But I can’t blame my photo, since I haven’t changed it since 2008. Out of ambivalence, not cunning. Perhaps it’s because I’m specific about the somewhat niche area I work in (not web) or perhaps those resume gaps I’ve always been cavalier about are finally catching up with me. Or maybe I should drop the 1990s era from my resume since that gives my age away.
Agreed. I just went through finding a new job, and I was a little worried about it, given everything I've heard about ageism in this industry. Far from that, I had loads of recruiters contacting me, and on the whole this job search was the easiest and fastest I've ever had. One interviewer commented on my age, which felt a little odd since it was something he brought up, and not part of the conversation. But, I don't feel like it hurt me, even in that situation. People were generally very cool.
At my old job, a YC startup, I was the oldest person on staff. Older than the founders, the VPs, or any of the developers by at least a few years. But, I can also remember being the youngest person at my first job, and on balance, I think my age was more of a professional liability for me back then than it is now. It wasn't a huge issue in either scenario.
This might be somewhat of an aberration (I hope it isn't, as I'm in the same boat, but it might be). A bunch of people got laid off during the pandemic and now everything is opening up and everyone is hiring and they've become more desperate for talent.
At least in theory. I have noticed a hesitance on some employers to actually bump their ranges for wages, and have had several recruiters tell me their client's budget for the role is criminally low, no wonder they're having trouble hiring people.
I get messages from recruiters based on technologies I haven't used in a decade (Android primarily). It's all generic enough that I assume the people have no specific interest in me, they are just casting a super wide net and may not even want to interview me if I responded.
I get messages from recruiters based on the very last thing I'm doing, even if I just started doing it in the last 6 months. I got the impression recruiters rarely read the LinkedIn profiles.
I assume that either most of the people decline right off the bat, or they have a very low cost of processing candidates, because that surely doesn't seem to be a very precise way to look for the right people.
I think last I got any message from a recruiter was more than 6 months ago. Granted I have nothing in my profile besides photo and a listing of the companies I worked for and position. Plus some endorsements and recommendations. But I would have expected that any recruiter could infer from the companies I worked for and endorsements enough. Maybe just an European thing. I'm mid 30s and have always been a top performer. All jobs I had so far were me applying on the company website. I don't understand where's that shortage I keep hearing about.
There was a mid-stage startup I was at that was happy to hire engineers in their 50s. The one caveat is they still need to be able to do the standard tech whiteboard interview.
> In terms of practical implications, the authors say these results reconfirm why photographs are usually absent from traditional resumes or CVs. As such, they suggest that removing photos from LinkedIn might make job-seeking fairer. The lack of photos might cause recruiters to focus more on information that is more relevant to the job.
I would be curious if Linkedin penalizes profiles missing a photo in their algorithm or whatever. I.e. I seem to recall getting badgered to add a photo when I didn't have one, and the implication that my profile was "incomplete." I suppose a way around this would be a completely unrelated photo, or a drawing of yourself, etc.
I'd love to see the same type of experiment with the person's race and gender, but that's probably too inflammatory of an experiment.
I recall reading that the effect on gender has been documented in classical musician auditions (women were selected more frequently with the introduction of blind auditions)
> The first thing they noticed is that the raw tabulations showed women doing worse behind the screens. But perhaps, Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse explained, blind auditions “lowered the average quality of female auditionees.” To control for ability, they analyzed a small subset of candidates who took part in both blind and nonblind auditions in three of the eight orchestras.
>The result was a tangle of ambiguous, contradictory trends. The screens seemed to help women in preliminary audition rounds but men in semifinal rounds. None of the findings were strong enough to draw broad conclusions one way or the other.
>So where did Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse get their totemic conclusion that blind auditions dramatically improved the success of women candidates? After warning that their findings were not statistically significant, they declared them to be “economically significant.”
Readit News
I think the underlying reason is when you have far more experience than your future boss they are intimidated by you.
I appreciate you're absolutely correct, age discrimination does happen. One thing to consider for older engineers is that, though your technical expertise improves through the decades, it's not just technologies that you have to keep up with but also cultural practices. That is, the bad culture fit isn't necessarily code for "We don't want you because you're old." but could be a genuine reason.
As an example, consider the book The Phoenix Project which dissects the reasons for discarding segregation of roles like developers, QA, and ops in separate teams into service teams of DevOps / T-shaped engineers. If you haven't worked in that environment or don't appreciate the difference, you may be judged accordingly.
if (candidate.canCode && !candidate.isAsshole) return true; return false;
That is so true; however, they tend to be weak managers with delicate egos and poor vision. Count yourself lucky you didn't waste your time.
There are plenty of managers who highly value experience and capability regardless of age. They are worth searching for. Such a manager's project is probably also more challenging and interesting.
Anytime someone younger interviewed me it never seemed to go well.
Recognize when to trust people and do just that--you know they're awesome, they know they're awesome, why not take advantage of that and build on it to create something more awesome? Learn to be wrong or make bad management decisions out of ignorance and accept when experienced people suggest or tell you otherwise--they may even give you a way out of a mess you created. Skilled people with that sort of experience often aren't trying to correct you to insult you, they're trying to help you, the team, and themselves by offering their wealth of experience and knowledge.
It's when experienced people like this are quiet is when you should really be worried. If they aren't making suggestions, unless you're sure of yourself, you've likely created or been subjected to an environment experienced individuals have given up on improving and are now in death marches on your project efforts, quietly updating their resumes and awakening their contacts, looking for new positions.
Biases due to profile picture adversely affecting marginalized is not new, Airbnb's black guests and owners have documented this under #AirbnbWhileBlack forcing the company to make several changes to how profile pictures and user names work.
But LinkedIn never acknowledged these issues and has instead doubled down on visual identity now like having 'Video introduction' as a primary feature. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce 'Upload your video to Sign in'[2].
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90460723/airbnbwhileblack-the-in...
[2] https://hitstartup.com/year-2025/
a recent AMZN innovation to optimize that process out - an explicitly stated max years of experience cap that thus effectively bars you even from applying (previous post with some replies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786601 )
You may be willing and qualified, yet because of age you can't even apply. Feels just nice.
Do you actually have any proof about what you're asserting?
I have 1 year experience. I also happen to have 2, 3, 4... etc. In total I have 15 but that includes any lesser number of years too.
I haven't yet found the proper words to converse through that, but a team of similarly older developers sharing similar concerns adds tremendous value.
yes, they assure me, they really want a software developer in the classic sense. this is an absolutely perfect fit.
and when I show up? welcome to the team, why dont you shadow joe who is going to be upgrading Kafka kafka this week.. at Google they actually pointed me at the nightly error queue for some AI pipeline and told me my job for the next 6 months was going to be pulling out the errors and manually fixing the input until it passes.
the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. so much so they dont even know what it looks like.
No offense, that kind of seems to be your issue, not theirs.
In large orgs if there are 10 'technical but not really dev roles' for ever 2 devs ... that's the reality of the world we live in.
It's maybe 'sad' that we call can't write code, but that's maybe not quite an 'industry' problem.
On the other hand, using giant fragile stacks with a million dependencies and systems that are an 'inherent mess' ... well that's maybe a little bit different and motivation is different because you might be actually wasting your time.
But in reality there is a ton of work to be done and most of it is not glamorous.
And if we all keep hiring only the best candidates, why would we think that they can’t write a better framework? somebody is writing a better framework.
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
I have this on my list of questions I ask interviewers. I should follow-up with "how much of your budget is dedicated to this?" Major red flag if they don't even know how much catering to their NIH syndrome currently costs them.
This rule about absolute failure in rolling your own realistically only applies to cryptography, because the bar there is set extremely high and there is a rigorous vetting process.
You're not wrong, although to be fair, it isn't always about hand-rolling a framework. Sometimes it's just about experience and knowledge about which existing framework might best fit a given use case (without unnecessary bloat) as opposed to just choosing the latest "ooh shiny!" bloated buzzword framework to build upon purely because it's new and trendy this week.
Although some use cases do call for the "bloated" framework, because feature requirements demand using a framework that provides those features. Again, experience and knowledge can inform whether this is necessarily the case, and one should obviously avoid hiring any applicant who does not see a valid need for the choice of framework/toolchain when it was chosen for good reason.
One of my frameworks has hundreds of open source contributors now, and tens of millions of downstream users use things built on top of it.
I'm now working on another one, and we just had our first few PRs from people who aren't me.
And I ain't too young anymore.
(And yes, this comment, while true, is tongue-in-cheek; there were darned good reasons for making new frameworks in both cases)
“It’s just typing. Typey typey type.”
I take that to mean, no matter the code base, no matter the questionable choices made historically and that will be made in the future, the job doesn’t change.
Figure out the requirements, grind until they’re met.
Who cares what the stack is and how many layers of libraries there are? If that becomes a problem we will fix it.
Exactly.
Can I get on with this person who will be my boss and these other people who I will sit next to for eight hours a day? Do I prefer JavaScript or Python?
One of those questions is much more important than the other.
I'm here to build a house, I want to talk about the architecture of structural design of it. I don't care what brand air nailer you guys use.
I don’t think being a framework partisan is a particularly good sign, but at least it shows you have some experience and reflection and taste with regard to the tensions involved in making things that run.
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Dead Comment
It is possible that there are other explanations. Older developers may want better salaries, better working conditions, be harder to manipulate, etc.
Good leadership is going to hire people that fits in the culture of the company and have the needed skills. Whenever the candidate is younger or older does not matter.
Bad leadership wants cheap employees that obey orders and don't challenge authority. Younger, more inexperienced developers will fit this category, even if they are technically skilled.
This is as good a theory that any other one to explain the fact that recruiters want younger developers.
That's me. I only 36 and I absolutely do not buy the corporate bullshit that someone's product is going to "change the world" through some incremental improvement of some software as a service. I am strongly against exploitative business models. And I know how much I am worth. When interviewing I like to give the CEO a little push back and see how they respond. I'm not going to work for someone who gets flustered when I question their thinking.
I will however provide a lot of value for a team I am comfortable with.
If bad leadership wanted cheap employees, that is easily filtered by hiring folks with less experience (for example) because those folks tend to be younger.
- A wizard, who spent 40 years knee-deep in technology.
- Someone with management experience.
- A flake-out who never did either.
I'm also less likely to cold-call someone more intimidating for random job screening, but more likely to reach out for something aligned to their skill set.
I'm a bit tired of folks saying older devs are not resistant to change. Reality - with experience some stuff just seems faddy at times over the course of longer career arcs. So yes, older devs can be bit resistant to jumping onto the latest bandwagon.
I think the Junior mistake is searching for a programming panacea. While lots of bad designs exist, perfect designs do not.
In software, if the prototype didn’t work, you tweak it and try again or even deploy with known issues and fix in prod later (looking at you game companies). If you had to throw away all your code and start over completely with each iteration like you do with rockets, you’d see more discussion and testing out earlier (in fact, you tend to see this more in critical software —- eg, the software that controls those rockets).
Finally, very few companies throw as much money behind business software as they do at rockets. I’d bet heavily that v8, .net, hotspot, or even gcc (metaphorical engines for your code) have only a fraction of the resources spent on a new rocket design.
Software engineering is much muddier
Deleted Comment
The moment some places figure out you’re over 45, it is over. Except for very forward looking start-ups who want to grow very quickly.
That is where I have been working for the past 10 years..best time of my life. But I also know, this is my last employer.
I had an interview for a "digital interactive agency" where a 24-year-old lectured me this and that and how great she was. She was flabbergasted to find out I had more people working under me than were in her entire company.
At the end of all this she says--"Do you think you are ready to step up to X quality?"
I had just finished my yearly reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), and I was pretty annoyed with her, so I asked, "How do you define quality?"
ZAMM is about a philosophy called the metaphysics of quality-- I knew that no matter what she said, I would have an advanced argument from ZAMM to belittle her with (the interview was just a formality at this point).
She replied, "Hmmm, I'll have to think about that." And I never heard from this individual or agency again.
I would like to think that day she learned not to say stupid things. Not to insult people over when you really don't even know what you're saying.
But I doubt it.
Messages from recruiters !== job offers. These things are completely automated and generated by AI at this point. I get dozens a week, and the rare one or two I respond to are met with total silence as they are being sent to thousands of people.
At my old job, a YC startup, I was the oldest person on staff. Older than the founders, the VPs, or any of the developers by at least a few years. But, I can also remember being the youngest person at my first job, and on balance, I think my age was more of a professional liability for me back then than it is now. It wasn't a huge issue in either scenario.
At least in theory. I have noticed a hesitance on some employers to actually bump their ranges for wages, and have had several recruiters tell me their client's budget for the role is criminally low, no wonder they're having trouble hiring people.
I assume that either most of the people decline right off the bat, or they have a very low cost of processing candidates, because that surely doesn't seem to be a very precise way to look for the right people.
Pretty sure most recruiters don't read beyond "keyword exists".
$ grep android resume.txt && send_email
I would be curious if Linkedin penalizes profiles missing a photo in their algorithm or whatever. I.e. I seem to recall getting badgered to add a photo when I didn't have one, and the implication that my profile was "incomplete." I suppose a way around this would be a completely unrelated photo, or a drawing of yourself, etc.
I'd love to see the same type of experiment with the person's race and gender, but that's probably too inflammatory of an experiment.
> The first thing they noticed is that the raw tabulations showed women doing worse behind the screens. But perhaps, Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse explained, blind auditions “lowered the average quality of female auditionees.” To control for ability, they analyzed a small subset of candidates who took part in both blind and nonblind auditions in three of the eight orchestras.
>The result was a tangle of ambiguous, contradictory trends. The screens seemed to help women in preliminary audition rounds but men in semifinal rounds. None of the findings were strong enough to draw broad conclusions one way or the other.
>So where did Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse get their totemic conclusion that blind auditions dramatically improved the success of women candidates? After warning that their findings were not statistically significant, they declared them to be “economically significant.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-auditi...