1. Giving them something interesting to work on
    2. Showing them that they won’t gradually be asked to take on BS assignments over time
    3. Letting them take every friday to go fishing or whatever it is they do

#1 would have been fine, for me. When I left my job (after 27 years, running a C++ image processing shop), I was looking for work that was interesting to me. I had my retirement set, and would have been quite happy to take a good deal less than many.

I have a pretty vast and varied skillset. I'm not famous, and never have been interested in that stuff, but I did work for a very well-known company, at a pretty deep level. I had an almost "perfect match" of skills for a startup (and I didn't mind taking a bit of a risk, as my retirement was set, anyway). I was looking for places where I could make a difference.

I also have an enormous portfolio of work, so there's absolutely no question at all, about what I can and can't do. Take fifteen minutes, browsing some of my repos, and it will tell you a lot more than some "Draw Spunky" leetcode test.

I was appalled at the way that I was treated -even by small shops (actually small shops and recruiters were the worst. Big shops treated me fairly well, but didn't have a compelling draw). I have come to learn that this was directly because I'm older. I was unaware of the animosity so many young folks have against us; but I am now painfully aware of it.

In my case, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired; whether or not I want. I found some non-profit folks that couldn't afford to pay me, and I work with them. I pop out a couple of small apps; from time to time; just to stay in practice, while I work on bigger stuff.

I think it's less animosity and more incompetence.

I remember once when I was younger - around ~26 - being interviewed by a ~22 year-old fresh out of college, and the interview was more like a college test.

What relevance did this have to what I would do at the company? Most likely - nothing.

But this was basically all this person knew.

The younger you are, the less ability you have to 1) know what's valuable, and 2) assess it.

Not that this is a particularly easy thing for anyone to do.

That being said - younger people are going to place close to no value on your decades of battle scars and experience. They don't have any. They probably like to think it's not worth anything - because it makes them feel better about not having it.

You know - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

I'd also caution on the things you perceive to actually be animosity - they're probably mostly jealousy. You're someone who has WAY more options available - so you can be demanding and picky about your employer. Younger people might hate that - but that's really jealousy. They probably don't actually hate you. There's a big difference.

I was shocked when he spent the whole hour asking soft questions like “So describe your previous team structure. How did ideas and plans arise? Who took responsibility? How was conflict resolved? What were your impressions?”

I always went hard on technical stuff when interviewing, was always worried that an incompetent would sneak through.

I asked the senior engineer his rationale. He told me “This guy went to X school and got Y degree and worked at Z company. So I know he’s smart enough. And I can teach him to write good software. But I can never teach him not to be a prick.”

I did get a couple of "bad hires," but never for tech reasons.

I suspect that part of the reason is that the smaller shops I looked at were based in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn's agesim is much worse than Silicon Valley. Also, I was interested in the kinds of startups that are probably dominated by energetic younger folks. I do native Swift (Apple) stuff, and have a lot of experience with things like SDKs, and hardware control/communication.

The bigger shops tended to have a lot less interesting work, but were also a lot more "stolid" in their approach to recruitment.

Like I said, I was looking for work that I found interesting. I'm sure I would have been able to find work that was less motivating.

As it has turned out, what I'm doing now, is highly motivating, and I no longer have a desire to go back to the rat race. In the aggregate, I'm glad things turned out the way they did. A couple of startups missed out, but I'm sure they'll be OK. I'm not God's gift to programming. I know that I am doing great.

Is that a Brooklyn/hipster thing, or a NYC finance culture thing seeping into the tech world?

In my experience, “classic” companies (which now include former “rebels,” like Meta, Google, and Apple) are more likely to be professional and courteous (we won’t talk about IBM, though), when it comes to dealing with older folks.

I’ll bet that my experience as a manager also spikes my chances. I have no interest, whatsoever in being a manager again, but it gave me some great viewpoints and experience with things like strategy and pitching.

> I had to do all the same coding tests

I don't know man.

I also deliberately avoided companies known for leetcode style interviews although I can do those kinds of tests too.

I have a current portfolio that is massive.

In fact, I just got done updating several apps and packages, so it's current as of about five minutes ago.

I wouldn't dream of taking me on faith. I never did, as a hiring manager, but I was also fairly good at evaluating folks. I would have killed for the kind of info I can provide; which makes it really weird, that people immediately dismiss it.

In any case, that's all water under the bridge, these days. Barn doors, horses, etc.

In any case if you're financially in a position that you can work on whatever you want it sounds like things might have worked out for the best despite the unpleasant interviewing experiences?

I’m not gonna be zipping around in a Bentley, but I live humbly, anyway.

I never realized how important it is to be truly happy with my vocation, until I was forced into it.

It was so ridiculous though, you aren't going to get people that have defined internet standards, started successful companies, invented important things... to come work at a place to bang out Jiras and get beat up over made up deadlines. And on top of that they were being completely inflexible and were not allowing remote work. Even if you pay them 7 figures, most of these types are already independently wealthy and that's not their motivation at that point in their careers.

I really did not expect this, I got negative seniority and quick NO from people with money.

I think is a losing proposition go to be another "employee", you are a mentor, a consultant, or something alike. Be in the "same" pool than younglings not work because you are not in the range, but playing good the "nice grandpa" can works well, imho.

Also: In the case of small companies is easier to "own" the interview process if is totally pointless or wrong. Take the experience and run with it: If fizbbuzz is on the path, derail the conversation and show something more impressive and how it could be teached to the team (this is by accident something that happened to me in one of my earlier roles long ago: I already bust the first interview and the second time I only remember going for the same company on site (!)... but that time I just sit with one of the developers and talk/code a little about something cool...)

I hires for a remote office that was near a certain FAANG office. We had applicants out of the FAANG company every week who just wanted out and many even let us know in their cover letters that they were willing to take a significant pay cut.

I know the HN trope is that FAANG jobs are all about doing some LeetCode to pass the interview and then it’s all easy from there, but that’s not actually the norm in FAANG jobs. If you’re collecting a high salary and working for a highly-paid, highly-motivated boss, the pressure is going to be high. It’s not for everyone and a lot of people discover that the high pay isn’t entirely worth it after a few years.

The biggest road block I saw with recent job ads is they want 8 hours / day. Companies just don't have the flexibility to take a senior dev at 4-6 hours a day.

I did see it once, and even then they just wink-wink approved 6 hours with a reduced pay but legally you were on the hook for 8 hours (at the reduced rate). Flexibility varies...

tbh in that context, the wink-nudge "you're 40 hours a week and we have a mandatory no-meetings friday, be sure you don't go do something fun because it'd be a real shame if you missed something important!" is actually potentially a better deal from the employee perspective because it's legally clear that you're a FTE.

It does seem somewhat rare.

Am i able to buy a physical copy / print on demand? Neither Amazon nor LeanPub are giving me the option (I'm UK based). Waterstones will let me POD your "Common Lisp Modules" book but that doesn't look as relevant for me (someone who's fallen for lisp but still very much learning). I do have a kindle but i've become one of those divisive types who now freely writes margin notes in his books.

Coding, solving fun problems I like doing, and even do on my own time. Useless meetings, bureaucracy, driving, and all the other job annoyances is what causes me to start adding multipliers to my salary requirements.

A job is not only a salary. Yes, salary is important, but I wouldn't take a 50% increase to work on a very inconvenient office location with no free coffee.

Also, don't waste the candidate's time with a BS hiring process. You want to bring this person you don't put them under the steamroller. Be gentle.

I had a long commute for a few years -- 9 hour workday with 3.5 hour round-trip commute, 5 days a week. I traded ~50% of my free time for ~50% more salary.

After factoring in commuting costs, taxes, and the time-saving services for things I used to do myself it wasn't as much of a net increase as I thought it would be.

But more importantly, what's the point of having money if you don't have time to use it?

I had really hoped to be hired in at Mozilla when I interned, since unlike many other companies, they paid a relativey decent wage then pay out cash rather than only give stock in "The Company" (then extort you over 2 to five years to break the internet and or the law, as your rent goes from an excessive 1500ish USD when I was last spending the summer in Frisco, to more like 4500 for a similar sized studio like I'd been looking into today.)

That combined with folks who know words like "schadenfreude" or "Neue Deutsche Härte" but not "cash for keys" or "duty to mitigate loss" can really grind the gears of folks who don't have the resources nor inclination to let neoliberals or worse "save face".

What do the Dallas suburbs have to do with this discussion?

https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/dont-call-it-fris...

Good news, we are avaiable on all levels in the hierachy. Less on C-level, or even just VP, but we are there. And to be honest, to get your company of the ground the last thing you want is an accomplished VP from big corp in your industry. Those career politicians are best suited for your board.

It's not just "older folks" that are burnt out from being effectively abused by employers for years or decades. I left my last employer after just shy of 16 years as I didn't have a cost of living increase in over a decade, worked over 400 hours of overtime in a calendar year and was constantly being asked for more, with every single thing I did being micromanaged with a time stamp down to the second with it going as far as some managers asking employees to notify them when they'd be AFK to use the toilet to justify a few minute gap in activity, while my CEO gave himself a 40-something million dollar annual raise (while being a multi-billionaire).

In the past year and a half roughly half of that office has quit, heck when I put in my notice one of my team leads had put his in day before and the one I directly reported to put in his the day after I did.

People are tired of being treated like crap, with or without "enough" pay.

Sometimes being trusted, being treated like an adult, and being given some amount of freedom is far more attractive than more money.

One example - one of the original creators of a mega-popular open source enterprise messaging product, that product is the defacto standard in its space, he created it around 2007-ish with 4 other folks. Today i don't see his name on recent commits but i'd be pretty sure he's still involved on the apache project board or something. He was a lead developer in a big org at that time but then levelled up to MD level over the course of a decade or so.

He builds houses now (not a typo - a moderately famous programmer who now has his own house building company), he teaches elderly folks in his community how to use the internet without falling to scams and he cranks out code for 2 startups on a part time basis.

From the things he engages with today it seems to me that he's not chasing money (he could walk into a mid 6-figure MD level role tomorrow if he relocated back to NYC) but fulfillment.

Another example, one of the most skeptical people i've ever met, i just can't imagine a scenario where someone manipulates him but anyway, he's maybe a year into pairing up with a fintech startup and best i can guess, he's paying them. I.e. i'm pretty sure he's invested money in them and i can't imagine they're providing his previous salary. He relocated so i only see on social media these days but he certainly appears to be having a blast of time and i've never seen him in as high spirits.

If it was manipulation then i'd be expecting to see underhanded tactics but that's not the suggestion here. The suggestion here is to meet demand for more interesting job roles with better flexibility for life and in return get the benefit of a top level developer in your org.