Posted by andsoitis 2 days ago
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
"Isn't that what you hired me for?"
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).
Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).
People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.
I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
I try not to be comic book guy these days. I was in the past. I just want to learn together with people. That is all.
Discussed here a couple of times as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361947 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649
I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.
My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.
I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.
I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)
If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.
We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!
I am in my 50's and I think the biggest discrimination I notice is not specifically age-related but cost-related. I am very expensive, a recent grad is not. Lots of companies think (some are right) that they can do well with the recent grads and are unwilling to shell out what it costs to hire me.
For context I’m 51. I’ve made the trade off of making less than I hypothetically could if I worked at larger companies/BigTech (been there done that got the t-shirt for almost four years until 2023).
while this is certainly not age discrimination I was just making a point that what sometimes looks like age discrimination it may not actually be that.
and most of the good money is definitely not in “big tech” (though too many people in our industry think that…)
Where exactly besides BigTech and equivalent can a college grad make $170K+ straight out of college and easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
Youngsters aren’t “worth” much of anything. They do negative work starting out.
I apologize if I sounded like I am pitching people should stay un-employed, I re-read my comment and I don’t think that I did. I would probably take lower paying job temporarily (not at this point in my career but when I was younger). however though, the 1/12 or 1/6 or 3/12 might sound significant but taking below-your-worth will probably end up worse in the long run if you stay long enough
> … easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
I think you are talking outliers and not for majority, not everyone working in “big tech” will make a mill in 4 years. but to answer your question, I made more in my first 4 years (not even inflation-adjusted) and this is 1999-2003. you can do it in several ways, the two I would recommend:
1. government contracting for a year or two (work your ass off and make top govies happy) then going solo or start your own firm when the contract is up
2. find a company that has been in the business for say 20+ years and has been profitable and has no more than 150 employees. in the first 1-2 years work your ass off and specifically volunteer to work on the worst shit most shy away from, the hardest problems, the worst parts of the codebase, ones that say // do not touch this, no one knows how it works. after some time it’ll be you that everyone turns to when hard problems need to be solved and further you will reach a point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. there may be a handful of such people in “big tech” (if that). once you get there you can go 1099 and charge just about anything you want.
overall, treat your self as corporation and every employment not as “I am slaving away for ____” but partnership between two corporations and career gets a lot better than working at “big tech”
The total compensation target at Amazon is based on
Year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% of your total stock package
Year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% of your total stock package
Year 3 and 4 - base + 20% of your stock vest every six months.
Usually around year 3 you get more stock.
Even an intern I mentored when I was ProServe their from 2020-late 2023 got a 600K four year initial package when they graduate and they got promoted to a mid level L5 in year 3 and will make around $750k-$800k depending on vesting schedule and price of AMZN when the offer was made over 4 years. ProServe (the internal consulting division ) and SAs make around 10% less than software developers.
My four year initial package was for $850K as a mid level consultant - I only had two years of AWS experience at the time. It was supposedly a “field by design” and permanently remote. They had an RTO mandate 6 months after I left - and had moved to Florida partially to save on taxes (no state tax)
GCP pays their senior consultants - full time employees around $250k -$280K
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/solutions-c...
Again they make less than software engineers
As far as “working my ass off” and going 1099, that was never appealing to me. I worked at AWS ProServe like I said for almost 4 years (full time) and now working as a staff consultant (full time) for a third party consulting company - cloud + app dev.
I like not having to worry about sales, accounting, benefits, chasing payments etc.
I like knowing that I can work 40 hours a week and money appears in my account on holidays, when I’m sick, on the bench, on vacation, etc.
As far as taking “any” job. When I was Amazoned in 2023, my goal was crazy enough to get any remote offer that wasn’t at a large company before my paid vacation reimbursement was up (9 days) and well before I started using my 3.5 month severance let alone my savings.
I took a full time job at a shitty consulting company, with a 20% pay cut and kept interviewing until I found something I wanted. It took a year to get the job I really wanted at the pay I wanted.
More relevant to old folks - like you and me and the article (I’m 51) - is that with AI and businesses jumping on board the hype train, AWS, GCP and Oracle are still hiring consultants, SAs and sales like crazy as companies are trying to figure out an “AI strategy”.
It’s good to be a shovel seller during a gold rush. Consulting companies and divisions love older people who still have relevant experience and can talk to “the business”
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.
Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.
as you say, cutthroat
places with older people & people with families i.e dads | mothers etc are a pleasure to work with
less bullshit, less time wasting, less chasing non productive hype
however the industry has been decimated lately, so now those places are rare
however I have discovered -- low-key cities tend to have places staffed with experienced colleagues
I do the same, try to help the young'uns shooting themselves in the foot. I've always enjoyed that part of the job.
It really annoys me that while I feel having the decades of experience to see through hype and the willingness to help newcomers are possibly the most important aspect of being a senior IC, no-one in the current culture care about that or see it as valuable.
In 2022, I interviewed with a company... in crypto.
I was the oldest in the company by a decade at least. They kept telling me they wanted experience. I have plenty, of experience. I was cautiously optimistic.
They eventually failed me on a test of reactJS. The funniest part was when I asked for feedback, the reason they gave me, were showing poor engineering technique on their end; a lack of understanding of what makes it down the wire.
So they wanted experience, but not the experience that prevents them from making mistakes of their own; not an experience that threatened their views. I realised this later. Young rock-star developers want experienced people around them, maybe, but they want to be free to reinvent the wheel on a whim.
Now when I interview some place and I eerily feel old, I just bow out respectfully. No point wasting everyone's time.
I was especially annoyed by recruiters that couldn’t do math. They loved all my experience, but ghosted me, as soon as they realized it came with gray hair. I guess the place is crawling with 35-year-olds with 30 years of experience.
As it turned out, I ended up giving up, and just retiring. I had the means, but wanted to keep working for at least another decade. I really enjoyed adding value. I was especially interested in helping small companies get on their feet, as my particular skillset would have been almost ideal for that, and my “nest egg” gave me a pretty good risk tolerance, along with a willingness to take a lower base.
Turns out that these were the exact companies that didn’t want me, though.
Also turned out that I really loved being retired. I have been doing more work in the last eight years, than in a couple of decades previously. I just don’t get paid for it, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I actively resist pursuing a paycheck, as I don’t want to deal with knuckleheads, anymore.
I just had to have my hand forced. I would not have voluntarily done this.
Realistically, most programmers never see another binary tree, after they leave school.
It's a "youth-pass filter." People right out of college will ace them. Us oldsters are less likely to do as well (unless we cram for them). In forty years of programming, I never encountered a single one, in the wild, and a lot of our image processing algorithms involved a decent amount of data crawling, so they had some relation to binary trees (shows why they teach them), but the way they were handled was much different.
Having experience usually means that you've acquired a holistic view of software development. Usually the hard way. But they want solutions, not advice or opinions.
I've met a few devs that makes a living like that. Get in, solve problems. Keep quiet. Get out. Wait for them to call back in a couple of years.
Ironically, the only people who have social permission to do that are extremely expensive Big Name outside consultants. Who will then do one of two things: either speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss; or produce a thinly veiled adaptation of whatever business book the CEO last read in an airport.
My wife is a management consultant and this is _exactly_ what she does in half of her projects. But it is a bit more sinister than that, the management consultant feed the info back to the _top_ bosses bypassing the middle-management hellscape.
For example, she did a project for a big bank where she interviewed 70 or so people her main output was a streamlined virtual machine requisition flow (which included merging a couple of teams together and configuring the ticketing system they already had). It used to take devs 6 months to get a VM. I bet the devs where yelling at their middle managers to sort it out, but their managers didn't have or want to actually bring it up with upper management with a plan on how to do it.
I joke that companies could just do that internally, have some people interviewing the leaf nodes in the org to find out top-down initiatives to help work get done, but companies simply don't do this.
Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems.
Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.
I did a few years at a company which was "product development consultancy", and this aspect of it was really enjoyable. We got a set of diverse challenges through the door, often "virtual startups" (CEO hiring consultants rather than staff in order to do v1 of a product). The company was basically a single room, and we had two senior guys (the founders) to review work and support us. Plus one "smartest guy in the room" who served as mathematician fire-support for things like signal processing or the rare actual DS&A problem.
Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
The title is clickbait. This reads more like marketing copy for the author’s consulting firm than any serious research.
They “help forward-thinking leaders and organisations see aging not as decline, but as a driver of innovation, resilience, and growth.”
why start with the 'not as a decline, but as'. its such a stupid way to put it.
i cant beleive marketing ppl still dont realize that you dont sell something by say 'oh its not actually a turd its delicious'. JUST SAY ITS DELICIOUS. NO ONE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS NOT.
you dont want to put a bad flavor in someones mouth and then try to wash it out. even LLM get this basic shit wrong lmao.
sorry a bit unrelated but considering the specific topic this tagline is suppose to address its really triggering.
I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.”
But really, you’re just making everyone less productive.
I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate.
9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough.
But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1]
Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer.
I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result.
[1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
We live to dream. That's where the magic happens, the meditation, the relaxation, the pondering of deeper ideas and solutions to the more important aspects of life.
You're trading that for something unimportant.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
As an IC, all of my designs just simply work without any drama. What happens in this scenario is that as soon as they learn what they needed to learn from me I am usually out. Also there seems to be some concept of drama and running around like a chicken with your head cut off is "fun" and I am a buzz kill in this situation.
As a manager I spend a lot of my time just making sure that everybody is set up for success as nobody seems to be able to advocate for themselves. Their communication is lacking they don't understand their audience or how to delegate. In these roles I am retained as long as I wish.
Smart doesn't equal knowledgeable and smart doesn't equal efficient. It's that simple. These are things best taught through experience.
Somehow it's consistently no drama and no nonsense place. Compared to the frat house atmosphere of the usual tech startup, it's really different.
For some reason they always seem to be privately owned by one person rather than publicly traded or owned by a corporation. At least in my experience.
Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members.
I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
those companies are rare. and most of the companies are still 100% top down with no talk back and everyone being a yes man.
In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly.
I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long.
I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
Programming as Theory Building: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
Then, the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else. Though I suppose you can make an argument that they might have similar workflows, or tools, or they might just have general experience that would be useful.
But I suppose your comment was more on the under-appreciation by management of existing tribal knowledge in a team.
[0] Perhaps out of necessity, e.g: company went under, or maybe they want a change of pace.
It cuts both ways. It pays to listen when someone goes 'We tried that at my last workplace, here is what happened..'
I've been lucky enough to have a few examples of that in my career.
- it exists (and will always exist)
- knowing it is *vital*
- maintaining ways of spreading it is *also* vitalIt’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.
That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
Younger workers as well.
I speak from my own experience from both sides of the table, now of course at the receiving end of the under appreciation.
Only keeping, or hiring too? Need a job HN. Though I don't do MS Teams, haha.
Being older is just part of the formula. Being good is another part, and having a good relationship with the company and coworkers, is just as important. That comes from longevity in the job, and also, a sense of security.
Companies love to have workers that are constantly afraid they’ll lose their jobs. That doesn’t really encourage a productive, quality-focused mindset.
There’s a lot of negative stuff, said about older employees. Maybe some of it is true, but I suspect that a lot of it, is an inevitable response to years of being treated like shit.