Startups need cheap workers who will work long hours. And honestly, for every one Google (who legitimately needed genius level scientists), you have 10 WhatsApps (which are glorified simple CRUD apps).
Now how are you going to get a guy (who sort of knows what he's doing) to work 15 hours a day for pizza?
You've got to trick him "Change the world", " we're the next Google ", " you get to use any stack you want"
When your a 20 year old kid, with no responsibilities and a future ahead of you, this sounds perfect. When you're 30 (and all the more so 40), you go to work to 1. Feed your family 2. If you want to "change the world", you work for a non-profit.
And all the skills don't matter. Your knowledge how to save RAM? Useless. Just spin up another VM.
So for the CEO of a startup, a 30 year old is simply too expensive for what he needs - a cheep code monkey. All the excuses are just that.
There is an elephant in the room that the Americans on HN are reluctant to admit, which is that the US healthcare system sucks. Startups can't easily afford the corporate health insurance premiums they need in order to attract older staff, so they perforce rely on the young and healthy — who are cheaper, don't have families, and don't have expensive chronic conditions.
The US healthcare system thus applies invisible constraints to hiring practices that encourage unspoken discrimination against experienced adults.
(Whereas in the UK we had a working NHS to provide cover for us and our families, and in Germany the insurance system is at least sane. Sure, our VC and finance sector is (or was, in my day) less hospitable to startups, but: swings and roundabouts.)
Things are going to be even worse IMO with the new adminstration.
At a startup I worked at, we were considering hiring a developer who was older than us (+20 years older), but in the end did not do it as we felt he might have trouble being managed by people significantly older than him. This was not my decision and I would have been in favor of hiring him - for the experience he could bring to the company.
Anyway, I now work in a team where most people (apart from 2) are older than me, and I consider that a priviledge. I get to learn from them in a great way, and I feel that I can teach them things as well. It goes both ways really.
And I do feel that in general here age is not such an important factor. Though that is just from looking at my colleagues, I am not in a comparable situation yet.
Just out of curiousity btw, does 'ff10' hold any relation to 'fast fingers'?
I am curious: Did something give you the impression he'd be bothered by a younger management, or was it just a general concern?
I am only 23, but I imagine I wouldn't have issues being managed by someone my age if I were 33. However, I know that I'd be pretty shit at management right now, and would definitely not want to manage someone older than me. Personally, I'd prefer to be managed by someone older than myself due to them having more experience. Then again, wisdom doesn't come solely from age; one can have more experience and wisdom at 15 than someone at 50.
My conclusion is that there is no conclusion, I guess.
When you get to 33, look at the 23 year olds around you, and imagine taking direction from them.
Imagine them making blatantly/obviously poor decisions, and understanding that because of these decisions you may very well be out of a job in 6 months.
Imagine there are half a dozen or more folks in your org that have been in similar situations, and they all have experience in "domain X", and are available to be probed for info/insight on domain X to help avoid poor decisions. Now imagine them all being completely overlooked because they're "old" (40) or aren't in the "circle" of the 23 year old manager/ceo.
There of course are exceptions to these scenarios, but they tend to be just that - exceptions. Most 23 year olds simply do not have the depth of experience needed to understand how and when to best use the folks around them. Think about this when you're 30, 33 or 40, and revisit the idea of being "managed" by a 23 year old.
This doesn't mean no one younger can ever manage anyone older - not by a longshot. But it's not trivial, and getting it 'right' takes a lot of work.
You didn't hire him because of his age. Isn't that illegal in pretty much the entire western world?
I guess that you can always make up some kind of excuse other than just saying "too old". But I am unaware of how they corresponded this to the person in question.
The former is legitimate: "this person will have issues with management and cause problems". The reason for this is a moot point: the candidate has issues with younger people, the candidate has a chip on his or her shoulder, or some other reason.
The latter is questionable: "This person is old, and old people have issues working for younger people, so we won't hire him."
Why would he have trouble being managed by people older than him?
Nah, I ain't that fast. There's a completely different story behind that but there's also a time and place for everything ;-)
Out of personal interest (my partner lives in Germany. I'm considering moving there in the long term, and I'm your age), how would you describe the German situation when it comes to diversity in general?
I think the diversity situation is not as complex in Germany compared to the coastal areas in the US – if you're talking about ethnicity. Sexual orientation and identity is not as much of a big deal here as well. Not because those questions are frowned upon or considered unimportant, but because those things are looked at with a more relaxed, laissez-faire attitude, at least in the urban areas. It's much less charged with political and religious ideas and action, maybe also because those questions are considered _a bit_ more private as well.
Those are just my 2 cents though, maybe someone else can add his own view, I'd be very interested in that myself.
(This is not a hit on Germany, which is a wonderful place. It's just how things work in the German-speaking parts of Europe.)
This is contrary to my personal experience.
English was absolutely the lingua franca.
At my last jobs (I'm a freelancer, so I get around), Germans were clearly the minority. The language environment tended to be very fluid; people joining or leaving a conversation would cause a switch in language, sometimes mid-sentence.
I currently work with 3 Russians, 1 Pakistani, 3 Germans.
> Without language skills you are likely to remain an outsider in non-work situations as well.
If you're thinking of outings with the team, if they are halfway decent they'll take you under their wing.
If you're thinking of day-to-day situations, it'll be harder of course, but absolutely feasible. Many people speak reasonable English.
To be fair a lot of my interaction has been in areas outside of large cities like Berlin, which are far more cosmopolitan than they used to be.
Whatsapp at 20 engineers delivered service to an audience comparable to Twitter, except with 1/100 the manpower (and hardware) and a couple of 9s more in reliability. They patched FreeBSD and Erlang to get there in the process.
it's a problem that was solved many times before, but not successfully at this scale or cost. These are not your run-of-the mill CRUD developers.
[1] https://medium.com/the-story-of-grip/5-things-every-founder-...
The Whatsapp guys were smart enough to think about using the right tool for the right job in the first place, i.e. stuff like Erlang - which has been tried and tested for scenarios like this for decades - and applied it to a modern infrastructure.
Twitter OTOH was built with Ruby on Rails... That's more like a fitting example. :)
Twitter isn't really comparable to WhatsApp. How many people read a tweet compared to a WhatsApp message.
There are tweeter messages that are read by millions, but they are offset by many tweeter messages read by no one. The average no. of followers of a tweeter account is 1, and 5-10% of all tweeter accounts are bots.
The distribution is different, but there are a lot of similarities that warrant comparison.
WhatsApp is a one to one messaging service.
Twitter is a one to many messaging service.
(that's a BIG difference, by many orders of magnitude)
I'm not familiar with the scale+cost of every every bank, stock exchange, flight search, messaging app, log transport system, telco CDR matching infra, etc. Can you comment re: similar scale/cost projects?
> They patched FreeBSD and Erlang
Neither of these are distributed systems, which I think is the interesting challenge part of messaging.
Do you have a link for this whatsapp info? It sounds like you got a lot of good information from it that others could benefit from by reading.
Here's another talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs
On the contrary - Erlang and its runtime were built from the ground up for use in distributed systems.
Wow! I didn't know that asking for more information was frowned upon on HN! Here's me pointedly not asking for links to the HN commenting guidelines.
-- falsedan
WhatsApp is not a good example.
There's a reason that company's success drove a huge amount of attention to Erlang, led to the popularity of Elixir and caused a whole lot of experienced developers to look deep enough to go "Holy crap! This solves so many problems!"
Infrastructure is always messy and needs maintenance.
I was just there to show the new office and some of our toys to my girlfriend, he was there because he was really excited about the job and just wanted to really kill it.
Twenty year olds generally haven't figured out what really matters in life, especially when it comes to work life balance. That's a valuable asset to most companies.
I told the kid to go home and have some fun, but I don't think he did. Later that day the 40-year old posted a picture in slack of him flying a drone with his kids, and just looking happy as a clam in mud.
As I got older, got married, had kids, that time is now spent helping my kids grow up. I have other things that take precedence over it. Honestly, I still think it would be fun to hack out a project for work on a weekend. I just don't have that luxury anymore.
I like my life equally (or rather, I try to not constantly judge my life) now as I did then but it's different.
Hopefully your 40-year old employee brings something different to the table - domain expertise, ideas born of repetition, lack of mistakes, dedication to quality craft that is equivalent to the raw output of your 20-something.
My cynical response to your cynical explanation is that bottom tier engineers only see bottom tier solutions.
Some (paraphrased) excerpts from conversations I've had recently-- "Would you be willing to do a coding challenge? "Sure, about how long is it?" "I'm not sure." "What subject is it on?" I'm not sure." "When do you need it?" "A week from today." "I'm going to be traveling starting tomorrow, can we do the test the week after next?" "No, I really need it on Tuesday." "So the only thing you know about this test-- is the due date? I can't commit to an unknown amount of work in a week where I know I'll be traveling."
"We only hire the best, absolutely best programmers." "Oh really? What would you say your average experience level is?" "3-5 years."
"We insist on the highest quality work, would you be able to perform at that level?" "How does your organization define quality?" ... what ensued was 5 minutes of stammering and "uhhhsss" until I let her off the hook.
Experience, at least in California, is a liability not an asset.
[1] https://medium.com/the-story-of-grip/5-things-every-founder-...
Offer tenure? Then you don't even need the pizza.
I want to do great, efficient work, and leave at 5pm every day to spend time with my family.
I don't give a shit if your office has free snacks, beer, and ping pong, I'm an adult. Life isn't work.
I also think startups have less experience running a company so assume if a developer knows x language and some experience with dbs will be able to build anything but then wonder why they have so many bugs / made so many bad design decisions.
"Ours is also one of the fewest industries based on scientific research which blatantly ignores the research, unless it is popularized in shallow books which rarely explore anything in depth. We have a constant churn of technologies which are often pointless, introducing new languages using extreme hype which is often unwarranted as those languages seldom expand beyond a basic domain representing a subset of LISP. I can’t think of a single developer I’ve met professionally who belong to the ACM or to IEEE, and when they run into an interesting problem tend to search Github or Stack Overflow, even when it is a basic algorithm problem. (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list.)"
I find it difficult to discern a common thread to the various claims made, but if I had to choose one, it's an obsession with novelty, which overlaps with your comments a little.
I'm a 40+ years old life-long programmer with some academic science background, and it's not possible for me to actually get a job. A few years back I thought I'd try to get a full time position, to no avail. The only work that happens for me is freelance work with clients who already know me. It's not an uncomfortable life, but there's also a very distinct ceiling I'm always aware of.
I was instrumental, and often also the de-facto project lead, in launching several multi-million websites and other software, but as a freelancer I'm not really benefitting from these successes. In most cases I can't even legally advertise it. I'm stuck at a medium income level that I feel could dry up very quickly if bad luck strikes.
The job market appears saturated with programmers, and to make matters worse for everyone involved, companies lack the tools and the will to even select applicants properly - I suspect this is partly due to the fact that programming is considered such a low-value skill. At times it feels like it's the corporate equivalent of working as a burger flipper. It's not really considered a dignified position to be in when you're 30. Yet, perversely, the world is built on software.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding - even inside tech companies and SV startups - what the nature of programming-as-a-profession is. In my opinion it should not be some menial work that should only be performed by unskilled youth looking to advance to a "real" job as soon as possible. It's a skilled trade that takes time to develop.
They resist the self-promotion to their own peril.
Do you have a portfolio site, sample open source projects, a blog? None of those are golden tickets and can hurt you if done poorly, but they are examples of what I've seen missing when I talk to unemployed (or under-employed) programmers.
Time spent learning how to get a job is probably better spent at this point than learning your craft better. Just short term.
Ageism can lower the odds, but you probably wouldn't be happy in those places anyway.
Another comment mentions the fact that interviewing or marketing yourself may be an issue. It also may be that you're not in the right geographical area, or that you're not interviewing at the right companies, or that your skill set on paper doesn't include the current high-paying buzzwords.
Oddly enough, Android development has been one of the highest demand items for me recently. I do think the full stack development world may be oversaturated, and that 98% of the developers in it are probably too green to do a great job running a project, so I agree with your assessment that most companies have a terrible interview process -- and that they consider programming to be a commodity, where it should be considered some combination of an engineering discipline and a craft that requires a skilled craftsman.
You wouldn't hire an artist whose entire portfolio consisted of collages of magazine photos, and yet companies are hiring programmers who literally can barely get beyond cut-and-paste coding. And you certainly wouldn't hire an unlicensed builder to create a skyscraper -- which is why we have so many companies' backends falling down like a house of cards the moment they get any traction.
Also, what sort of contracts are you signing where you can't even disclose what you did? I've done some consulting work in the past (though admittedly not a lot), and I don't think I've even seen that sort of thing attempted. Obviously there are NDAs on the actual product of the work, but no one's ever attempted to prevent me from claiming I did it.
You work with a constant target on your back. Your bosses have no political capital to defend you in the media, if they aren't marching in lockstep with the demagogues running the budgeting process who are calling your work "government waste", etc. The list goes on.
However I also started programming when I was close to 30. I'm now near 50 and I'm still programming. I have to justify what I've learned. On the other hand I actually have learned. And it doesn't take too many rounds of, "Here is what I learned from X ... and so I suggest Y" working out in spades to demonstrate my value.
It is easy to work yourself into a career dead end. It is also easy to not stretch and find yourself with skills that were once great but no longer applicable. I have seen these happen to very good people.
But being unemployed because you are old is far from inevitable.
Not everyone can or wants to live in Valley.
On the other hand I'm not from the USA, and what's worse - currently I need to have only remote job - which makes searching for a job even more hilarious.
If none of that is an option, I guess you could always try Botox :( https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brut...
But I have a question. Why can't you exactly walk away from the opportunity and money? I have exactly walked away from it and was better off for it. Not everyone will be, no doubt, but the fact that I exist means that it is possible ;-)
About the only positive thing I can say about code I wrote in my 20s is it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Oh - and I work in a startup.
This is very comforting to hear! I'm 27 and feel the same way. I can only hope that I keep getting better at this whole thing, and that I can keep ahold of the feeling that I am getting better at it, as you appear to have.
You will feel the same way in ten years and in twenty. Except by then you'll recognize the pattern. I have seen lots of good programmers (I am not one) and the more experience then accumulated, the better they become.
I'd gladly head that way. Pure software engineering is gradually becoming less interesting to me over the course of my career - the people problems are the ones I like.
However... I'm older than you and have never gotten a "you're too old" vibe from anyone. In fact, if I have a complaint it's the opposite, it's that some companies want to treat me the same as someone 10 years younger - i.e. they don't see much difference between 2 and 10 years of experience, and you're a "Software Engineer" either way.
Sorry, still a bit bitter.
Wait, how are you supposed to be a senior level developer without at least 10 years experience?
Knowledge and professional experience are not properly reflected by age. Naïveté and lower expectations however usually are, which may explaing agist hiring preferences.
On the other hand, somebody that has deeply learned their craft and is still actively learning makes a very attractive employee. Age and number of years on the job by themselves say nothing about ability.
I am not even that strong with the latest whiz bang JavaScript framework of the week but I can architect anything with my chosen stack and I know what I know on a very deep level.
Those roles carry various titles - Principals, Architects, etc., but basically it is the non-management track.
In my team it's architects, senior programmers in both age and skill. Use them for code reviews, query tuning, investigating infrastructure/code improvements, etc.
Invaluable help, true multipliers.
Yea, 32 years old programmer is just too old, 32 years old surgeon is usually too young to work alone.
I keep on learning, I have accumulated lots of knowledge working in different areas of programming like system administration, database administration, programming etc. I have been payed to program using over a dozen of programming languages... At interviews I still hear "oh, you know, I'd love to have experience like yours"...
And I still hear "you are too old". What's more funny - people are not embarrassed saying that. Even though that's illegal where I live. Writing "we want to hire a woman/man only" is also illegal, but people still write that, and no one reacts.
I'm afraid I will be totally unemployable in a couple of years, just after my 40, which will come too soon. And I don't want to get into management only position (which is also hard, as I cannot get a management job "because you haven't worked on such a position, and you are too old to start that".
That's hilarious, but on the other hand that explains a couple of things like a-brand-new-hyped-technology, which is just a rewrite of what we had 20 years ago.