I kind of feel like the author is referring to Zuckerberg's famous comment about young people being smarter. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was suitably shocking and stupid so it's a candidate anyway. The thing I like about Rachel's take on this is that she gets right to the key thing: regardless of what field you're in, or how you spend your time, the vast majority of us are going to be neither horrible failures nor amazing successes. We're far more likely to just be ordinary human beings, who probably need to earn a living and have something useful to do every day. Fwiw I'm 58 and a working site reliability engineer and developer. I don't really live paycheck to paycheck, but neither can I just quit working and go instagramming about the globe. I'm fortunate to work for a very diverse company that values everyone for what they can contribute, but I am also cognizant of the people who will look at me and wonder why the greybeard never "made it." Those people probably won't "make it" either, and anyway, nobody seems to wonder why the old Italian guy in the town next to us still gets up every day and fixes shoes.
Zuckerberg said this to attendees at the Y Combinator Startup School event at Stanford in late March, 2007 [1]
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)
"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
Chess masters do commonly mention noticing a decline in what might be called their raw processing power as early as their late 20's, but most results peak in their mid '30's [2] and some peak in their '40's. (And should spending your time playing chess be a marker for intelligence?)
But wisdom is in part knowing what is worth working on (such as should you spend your time playing chess), and that is generally accepted to increase with experience. For example, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. [3]
From a point of view, I might even agree with Zuck's asinine statement. When I was in my 20's, I had no idea how many things I truly did not know. So, in my limited "fresh out of college" way, I was pushing maximum intelligence. As the years have flown by, I've learned just how vast many fields are. Introspectively, I've learned that I'm not the brightest mind in any given room. As a matter of fact, I've just barely scratched the surface. Many, as they get older, realize this harsh reality. For me, I was probably very smart... and completely ignorant. In tech, this is inflated as we seem to rediscover old paradigms every few years, yet we look at those that may have lived through an earlier "discovery" as "irrelevant geezers". Many of could never dream to achieve the level of things that Alan Kay has forgotten, but we sure will treat his contemporaries as worthless. Zuck will get there some day. And I doubt history will remember his as a great visionary.
Given that this is something Zuckerberg said 12 years ago, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he doesn't think that way anymore. (The benefits of experience!)
Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options. I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a company. I also was a "paper" millionaire during the dot-com boom. The start-up where I worked was bought making my options worth millions. There was a 6 month lock out and during that time the stock price went from $75 to $0.75. My options were at $2. Did that make me a bad developer? At another company I had options at $7. The stock peaked a few years later at $60. I never exercised any because I was greedy. I was going to cash out when it hit $75. When I left the company after 6 years, the stock was at $8. All in all, I was almost always one of the best developers, but I never made "FU" money. I did learn to exercise options as soon as they were worth a decent amount, but never made enough to be rich that way. I'm sure there are many old developers who were as dumb financially as I was.
Also, sometimes you don't make enough for early retirement because...gasp...you don't prioritize money over everything else. Some of us have tried to use our talents to do things that are socially responsible. Whether it's doing something in the non-profit space, working on a company that targets the underprivileged, something to do with the environment or anything along those lines, not everyone is comfortable invading people's privacy to serve them ads.
So, yeah, some of us are still working because we had the naivete to want to make the world a better place.
I got hurt from that time in a different way. the year before graduation companies was asking me if I would come work for them and not graduate. the next year everyone was out of business and I couldn't find a job as I was competing with devs with years of experience. the following year of still not being able to find work was a different problem, why hire me when they can hire a fresh grad? after 3 years I finally found an IT support position for 28,000/year. I eventually crawled my way out of the situation and making great money at a great company, but that really hurt.
when I see kids graduate now making 100k first year out of college mostly because they graduated during the right time in the right place, I am happy for them but they don't realize how lucky they are
* Startup in Midwestern city. Company never grew much, pivoted several times, still in business selling storage products. If I'd stayed with them, I would have had a long, boring career. One guy I knew did stay there and had a long, boring career.
* Heavy industrial company in Detroit. Acquired by a bigger company long after I left, Detroit plant closed.
* Time-sharing startup company in greater NYC area. Went bust. Technology worked fine, sales not so much. Left 3 weeks before shutdown.
* Time-sharing startup company in Silicon Valley. More successful. Acquired by bigger company after I left. Time-sharing was clearly on the way out. Time to leave that industry.
* Big aerospace company R&D operation. That's where I got into theory. Split into several units years after I left, some acquired by other companies.
* Small startup that got big. Cashed out.
* Careful about spending, reached retirement age in good shape.
You are being too hard on yourself. Your personal history is an extremely recent phenomenon in civilization where there is no guide on what to do simply because virtually no humans have ever been in that scenario. Even today, most people are unfortunately terribly financially illiterate - especially with equity.
> Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions.
This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.
Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.
Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.
You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.
I'll write a longer post about this one day but you bring up a really good point. Identifying the very specific "greed emotion" that makes us make less-secure financial choices I think is a really valuable skill. That's not to say that you should always ignore it -- but it's important to identify it so you can recognize your motivations for making decisions.
I had a similar issue to you a few years back - I was offered a buyout in a partnership that would have put a nice chunk of $ in my pocket, but I (naively) believed that staying in would put more. It fell apart and ended up being worth much less.
I'm not sure I'd have made a _different_ decision, but I certainly have learned to recognize when these moments appear so I can more rationally understand my own decisions.
Anyway - this is all to say, don't sweat it. You've learned, you're lucky to have picked good companies, now take that wisdom and make a less-greedy decision next time.
Me too, I went all in on Apple stock when the iPhone was announced, on margin I was so convinced. Sounds great right? Well broker sold everything during the 2008 meltdown and lost everything.
That sounds quite unfortunate for your stock options. But why don't you sell your options, pocket it, and set up an investment portfolio to reduce risk after the first crash?
Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of Elitism if you didn't go to MIT or Harvard, too. I'd like to think more about this and write dome some elegant thoughts, but...
I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way less experience and people applying their hiring "playbook" without much thought. I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.
Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. It's almost as if the tech industry wants most of the people to have two or three years experience.
I've been equating it to working in Hollywood to some.
Still trying to figure out where I went wrong in my career, but as others have said below, not all startups you work for succeed, not all companies you create succeed, lock-up periods, senior executive corruption (I worked for a publicly traded company where the CFO actually went to jail), etc.
> I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.
> Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market.
Which is it? Do you want an older engineer to have the same hiring bar and same compensation or a higher bar and higher compensation?
Realistically, there should be no "same bar, but higher compensation" option. If I'm paying you more, it's because you're better, not because you have more candles on your birthday cake.
I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code despite the fact that I told them well in advance that I have never worked with Ruby.
There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else. There is really only one way to assess someone's ability to write code, and that is to have them write code in a language and environment with which they are already familiar. Modern coding is so complex and requires so much infrastructure that productivity hinges as much or more on the impedance match between a person and their environment as it does on their actual abilities. Even the most brilliant coder will stumble if they use emacs day to day and you force them to use vi.
If you want to assess my ability to come up to speed on a new environment, I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be. Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum.
The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract programmers who moved into management or got out entirely, there’s just not going to be that many.
This is more for y’all youngsters who are afraid you’ll be put out to pasture when you turn $age-you-think-is-old. No reason to think it’ll happen, experience is useful, you’ll be fine.
Yes, you’ll find some ageist managers out there, who won’t hire you if you’ve been legally drinking for more than ten years. Good! You dodged a bullet there, such people invariably have other bad habits.
Luck is a huge part of success. It's mythology that if you work hard enough for long enough that the world will become your oyster. Sweat and ingenuity are often necessary but not necessarily sufficient means to financial gain. No one launches from the same starting line nor runs along the same track. And don't forget that all the other smart folks out there are ravenously competing against you for those hotly desired greenbacks. Count your blessings if you are one of the lucky ones.
If one thinks 35+ is to old to code, well I have news for you. At 35+ you learn how to manage time and prioritize better. Life throws another ranch in your bucket of problems, marriage and children. When you are young, you are hired as an engineer to work 40 hours, which we all know very well that working for startups that means 80 hours or you are not putting good effort. Well with a family that’s not possible, as you know that 40 hours at work means that exactly. The rest of the 40 hours are meant to be spent taking care of your family.
So if one more recruiter doesnt offer the job interview, it’s because they don’t understand what life is all about. If you have no time to socialize and network or raise a good family, soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people. Talent is not born, talent is made and it starts with a good foundation, called FAMILY.
The distinction between valley culture and everywhere else is never made in these pieces which is a pity. I work in fortune 500s and we’re all 40+ in these companies. I rarely see 20s.
I'm 34, left my 7 years relation two years ago, am gay and never thought I could have kids and am not planning on having kids any time soon. This kind of thinking about that the traits that one develops with age and experience only come about with raising a family kind of worries me, I have a pretty good idea on what I'm missing on since absolutely all my good friends from university and most of my close friends from my past two gigs are raising kids. I just don't think I'm in te proper situation to do it. I also think I can manage time and prioritize better because life did throw stuff at me, just not marriage and children.
Also, if I feel like it, I can work 80 hour weeks. I just need to rest after doing it and can't sustain it for too long. I don't know if I can't sustain it for too long "because of age", or if because of experience I do now realize I'm doing everything wrong because of burnout, and when I was young I just powered through doing wrong shit when I was stressed out or sleep deprived and didn't asses I was doing wrong shit.
Unfortunately these kinds of shitty recruiters and companies will always be around - none of them are thinking about lofty societal goods like family or what happens 40 years later, they are thinking about how to get the most work for the lowest price for their company. As long as droves of young people continue to flock to tech to try and get their share of the money, hiring is a buyers market. Throwing out old people or young people who dare to demand work-life balance will remain a viable strategy for the buyers and many will do just that.
> soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people
I fear we are well on our way to this type of society. "Learning" is a virtue. You'll hear many people say, "I like learning," or some other version of this cliche. It reminds me of this idea, and it makes me cringe, partly because of the robotic aspect and partly because it means they've chosen self-focus and self-improvement over helping others. They've chosen this in terms of priorities well ahead of mentorship, at least to the point where they'll say it out loud.
I think ageism even has an impact on this generation. The quality of software produced is much lower than it could be because we mostly have young guys doing all the work. Ageism is also why we repeat of trends every generation. Our industry simply has no memory.
"If you have no time to socialize and network or raise a good family, soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people."
I suspect that there is no "bettering themselves" going on in that scenario. That only happens if you close the loop. Running open loop is just a random walk into crazy-town.
Additionally, people over 35 start gaining a better perspective on systems. It's not just experience, your brain actually changes and you see things differently. So, while you might not switch windows or pump out lines of code as quickly as a younger person, you might be able to design better systems and write less code overall, because you will know what is really necessary.
Sailing the world sounds boring. It's too passive. I'll be working creating new things until they carry me out in a box.
I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work.
I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoyed the crew by complaining that they'd changed course to avoid a storm.
This is something that has been bothering me somewhat. The following in particular bothers me a lot:
> "Why are you still working?"
The answer for me is simple - because I want to. I learned how to program at the tender age of 10 using a book that came with a C64 that my dad got for free from a garage sale.
Since those first years, the field at every turn has provided me with new intellectual challenges and as I've progressed I've accumulated different ideas and projects that I'd like to complete. That includes reasonably fleshed out ideas in bioinformatics, in distributed operating systems, in models for runtime type inference for dynamically typed programming languages, virtual machine construction techniques, and more.
I will never have enough time in my life to fully explore all of these - each of them will take years of dedicated effort to actually make something out of - so I have to pick and choose wisely to pursue the projects I care about given the opportunities presented to me.
My version of "cashing out" is basically sticking my money in a savings account and getting back to working on interesting things.. or if I have enough of it, using that money to pay some people to help me explore some of the more interesting things I have in my mental back pocket.
Some of us actually are passionate about our work. I suppose there are many that are in the field simply to make some big money and get out and live "the good life". I consider the life I would live doing that, and it just feels so soul-crushingly boring and insipid. What a waste of a life.
I wonder if part of the issue is a kind of unspoken fear that the “dream” outcome may not be as common as people want to believe.
If I am a young developer with more stock options than salary I want to believe that I will have the option of retiring early. Seeing older devs who were not able to “cash out” plays poorly with that narrative.
I had a chat with some recruiters recently and they told me there is no future in the industry for people who are 35+ years old. I'm 33 so I just smiled and walked away. I later learned the founder of this recruitment company was 26. Young kids seem to think there is no brains in older people.
On the other hand I always thought the natural progression for the programmer is to move to higher abstraction level, become lead/coach/consultant... or start something on their own.
I am 67, but this story occurred when I was young and just out of college: there was a very old computer programmer at work who had great skill but he miss-applied it. The worse thing he did was writing tortured FORTRAN code that self modified itself at runtime - hardware architecture and operating system dependent binary patches. I promised myself I would never be that guy, read the book ‘The Egoless Programmer’ and followed a different career path from my old friend.
In my 20s, I used to think like that because that's what I was told by everyone around me. Now I find this idea infuriating.
I'm almost 30 now and I've been working insanely hard since before I left school and during university; I've been working at least 70 hours per week for 12 years (40 hours on my startup or corporate contracting day job, 30 hours on a side project). I've had some minor successes but still no big break - I'm not far from where I left off financially.
One of the many companies I worked for is doing relatively well and I'm hopeful that my small stake will be worth enough to buy a modest house/apartment someday but it's still a big gamble at this stage; the shares could still become worthless... Even if everything goes perfectly well, it's still not enough for me to retire. I feel that I got very lucky with that one. I can clearly see how it's possible to get to 50 years old working nonstop like a freak and making all the right decisions and still not make it financially.
I've been quite strategic about my career so far. I worked for startups which had relatively low valuations, proven tech, value-creating areas, fast growth, good investors, smart founders, were just starting to onboard big clients and sign big contracts. I also worked for a few hyped SV startups too (I worked for a SV-based Y Combinator company for over a year).
Even among the 12 or so software companies that I worked at and left, none of them had successful exits yet or grew sufficiently that it would have allowed me to make enough money to retire (even if I could pick the best one and assume that I had been able to negotiate a good equity package). Only one startup I worked at is doing relatively well and that's also the one which I stayed at the longest and have the most equity in.
I feel that people who got a big break before they turned 30 missed out on learning about reality.
I’m so grateful to have worked with older colleagues who did not care about using the framework du jour. Influenced by their experience, we made some unorthodox tech choices as a web startup, including the choice to use C++ and Lisp-like languages heavily, and it worked out beautifully. From them, I learned that it is more important to ship simple, fast code than to contort your system to use the latest tech fads when it doesn’t make sense.
I took a bunch of time and focused on helping coders instead of coding myself. I came to coding naturally and never thought of it as much more than intellectual self-stimulation. It was a lot of fun, and there is some value to it -- but it tends to get a lot more attention than it should simply because it feels so good to do it well. Successful startup founders say that coding is no more than 2-3% of the total effort of providing value to people. I've found nothing to prove that false; and I've seen a lot of companies and startups.
Recently I'm back to focusing more on coding. I find two things most interesting:
1. As I get older, I struggle with attention span and short-term memory more, but I have greater ability to see deep and widespread cross-cutting patterns. It's probably an even trade.
2. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that good coding is managing cognitive complexity. You're always trying to make it work, then make it easy to understand and maintain. When I think back on all of the multi-billion-dollars I've seen in project/program disasters, none of it was because the problems were hard. They were all a combination of poor customer/user participation and smart folks taking a problem of n complexity and making it into a problem of n^n complexity. Usually the two were related: tech was constantly used as sort of a band-aid to fix people problems. It never worked, but it kept a lot of coders employed for a long time.
Hopefully this wasn't cynical. I love coding and I love making useful things for people. I have a deep passion for helping developers lead happier and more productive lives. But I also feel an obligation to be honest about what happens. It looks a lot different at 50 than it did at 25.
Think about it. Seriously, would you want somebody telling you that you wasted three years of dev time and could scrap what you have and roll something useful to production in a month? I've done that several times in my career, at various ages, and nobody ever liked hearing it. As I got older they liked hearing it even less. In this business, inexperience, raw intelligence, and enthusiasm are the things we reward. They come mostly with younger folks.
Tech development is amazing and incredible because we create our own realities. But part of that awesomeness is the fact that left alone, we create realities that look like ourselves. It is the nature of the work.
> 2. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding.
It depends on their attitude. The smarter the better, IMO, as long as they understand that the code they're writing isn't for them. They can go hack on some personal project if they want to flex their "I'm so clever" muscles, but if they're writing commercial code, that code is for the dumbest of the dumb who will ever have to maintain it. If someone can focus their intellect towards making their code clear and simple then great.
Of course, as you say, someone who's competent but has a slightly humbler intellect will just automatically write simpler code.
Someone correct me, but is the article generalizing some one young CEO to represent the entire Silicon Valley? If yes, is that accurate?
I’ve come across those types of people in my career. They were cancerous and didn’t last long. I’ve learned to tune out the noise and cut off people like that. Fortunately for me, I’ve never had run ins where these people had power over me. If they did, it’s a shitty company IMO to bring in people like that and I’m better off elsewhere.
Average age on my engineering team is about 55. Until recently, the eldest was still coding at 73.
When I look across the team, the more productive ones are those who keep their skills and tools up to date. Find a 30 year vet who can code the same routine in both Go and Python and you'll usually find a productive, dependable engineer who steers you around many gopher holes.
Young Michael Jordan could leap high and perform dazzling feats in mid-air. Old Michael Jordan had tired legs, but could destroy the competition with an insanely tight post-up game, and a virtually undefeatable fade-away jump shot.
I’ve personally always felt incredibly fortunate to get to work with people who’ve been in the industry a long time; you can learn a lot from them. And while you sometimes can get a “step” on them with your youth, they’ll often school you with the fundamentals.
This is part of the diversity conversation — having a team composed of people from all walks of life is a competitive advantage. But it takes an enlightened “coach” to see it.
Is it really common to retire at 35? I'd think it would be just a few could afford that. Around here property taxes plus health insurance for a family is $50k/yr. So from 35->65 that is $1.5m. Not including cost of living of course.
Maybe the stock market has been way too successful in the last few decades. Ask a European or Japanese person about retiring early and living off the market.
(of course many 35 year olds are struggling to save for a house deposit let alone thinking about retiring)
Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em.
Also, wealth is the world's shittiest metric for success. I know a ton of people with incredible skills who work rather low-paying jobs because they want to improve the world, follow a particular passion, or whatever.
>>Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em.
Well, there are other reasons. People you hire straight out of college tend to feel grateful, and also feel like they need to prove themselves (which is true). So they are usually willing to work extra hard. This can be a good quality, if nurtured properly with guidance and training.
[+] [-] markbnj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuantumGood|7 years ago|reply
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)
"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
Chess masters do commonly mention noticing a decline in what might be called their raw processing power as early as their late 20's, but most results peak in their mid '30's [2] and some peak in their '40's. (And should spending your time playing chess be a marker for intelligence?)
But wisdom is in part knowing what is worth working on (such as should you spend your time playing chess), and that is generally accepted to increase with experience. For example, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. [3]
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-sma...
[2] https://theconversation.com/anand-vs-carlsen-the-age-effect-...
[3] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
EDIT: Fixed year of quote reference.
[+] [-] nobleach|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curun1r|7 years ago|reply
So, yeah, some of us are still working because we had the naivete to want to make the world a better place.
[+] [-] autokad|7 years ago|reply
when I see kids graduate now making 100k first year out of college mostly because they graduated during the right time in the right place, I am happy for them but they don't realize how lucky they are
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
* Startup in Midwestern city. Company never grew much, pivoted several times, still in business selling storage products. If I'd stayed with them, I would have had a long, boring career. One guy I knew did stay there and had a long, boring career.
* Heavy industrial company in Detroit. Acquired by a bigger company long after I left, Detroit plant closed.
* Time-sharing startup company in greater NYC area. Went bust. Technology worked fine, sales not so much. Left 3 weeks before shutdown.
* Time-sharing startup company in Silicon Valley. More successful. Acquired by bigger company after I left. Time-sharing was clearly on the way out. Time to leave that industry.
* Big aerospace company R&D operation. That's where I got into theory. Split into several units years after I left, some acquired by other companies.
* Small startup that got big. Cashed out.
* Careful about spending, reached retirement age in good shape.
[+] [-] xuki|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achillesheels|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|7 years ago|reply
Sad that cashing out may have ejected "staying and contributing" as a measure of success and indicator of worth.
[+] [-] SimonPStevens|7 years ago|reply
This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.
Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.
Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.
You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.
[+] [-] nlh|7 years ago|reply
I had a similar issue to you a few years back - I was offered a buyout in a partnership that would have put a nice chunk of $ in my pocket, but I (naively) believed that staying in would put more. It fell apart and ended up being worth much less.
I'm not sure I'd have made a _different_ decision, but I certainly have learned to recognize when these moments appear so I can more rationally understand my own decisions.
Anyway - this is all to say, don't sweat it. You've learned, you're lucky to have picked good companies, now take that wisdom and make a less-greedy decision next time.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosege|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] leemailll|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taude|7 years ago|reply
I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way less experience and people applying their hiring "playbook" without much thought. I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.
Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. It's almost as if the tech industry wants most of the people to have two or three years experience.
I've been equating it to working in Hollywood to some.
Still trying to figure out where I went wrong in my career, but as others have said below, not all startups you work for succeed, not all companies you create succeed, lock-up periods, senior executive corruption (I worked for a publicly traded company where the CFO actually went to jail), etc.
[+] [-] sokoloff|7 years ago|reply
> Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market.
Which is it? Do you want an older engineer to have the same hiring bar and same compensation or a higher bar and higher compensation?
Realistically, there should be no "same bar, but higher compensation" option. If I'm paying you more, it's because you're better, not because you have more candles on your birthday cake.
[+] [-] lisper|7 years ago|reply
There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else. There is really only one way to assess someone's ability to write code, and that is to have them write code in a language and environment with which they are already familiar. Modern coding is so complex and requires so much infrastructure that productivity hinges as much or more on the impedance match between a person and their environment as it does on their actual abilities. Even the most brilliant coder will stumble if they use emacs day to day and you force them to use vi.
If you want to assess my ability to come up to speed on a new environment, I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
[+] [-] samatman|7 years ago|reply
The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract programmers who moved into management or got out entirely, there’s just not going to be that many.
This is more for y’all youngsters who are afraid you’ll be put out to pasture when you turn $age-you-think-is-old. No reason to think it’ll happen, experience is useful, you’ll be fine.
Yes, you’ll find some ageist managers out there, who won’t hire you if you’ve been legally drinking for more than ten years. Good! You dodged a bullet there, such people invariably have other bad habits.
[+] [-] cathames|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slics|7 years ago|reply
So if one more recruiter doesnt offer the job interview, it’s because they don’t understand what life is all about. If you have no time to socialize and network or raise a good family, soon we will be left with a society that only focuses on how to better themselves and not mentoring or preparing the next generation of smart people. Talent is not born, talent is made and it starts with a good foundation, called FAMILY.
[+] [-] marktangotango|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvarangot|7 years ago|reply
Also, if I feel like it, I can work 80 hour weeks. I just need to rest after doing it and can't sustain it for too long. I don't know if I can't sustain it for too long "because of age", or if because of experience I do now realize I'm doing everything wrong because of burnout, and when I was young I just powered through doing wrong shit when I was stressed out or sleep deprived and didn't asses I was doing wrong shit.
[+] [-] zaptheimpaler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isoskeles|7 years ago|reply
I fear we are well on our way to this type of society. "Learning" is a virtue. You'll hear many people say, "I like learning," or some other version of this cliche. It reminds me of this idea, and it makes me cringe, partly because of the robotic aspect and partly because it means they've chosen self-focus and self-improvement over helping others. They've chosen this in terms of priorities well ahead of mentorship, at least to the point where they'll say it out loud.
[+] [-] mempko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulie_a|7 years ago|reply
The younger ones can overwork themselves, job hop, write bad code. And then an experienced coder can sigh and fix it.
[+] [-] mcguire|7 years ago|reply
I suspect that there is no "bettering themselves" going on in that scenario. That only happens if you close the loop. Running open loop is just a random walk into crazy-town.
[+] [-] jwr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|7 years ago|reply
Did you mean "wrench", as in "throw a wrench in the works"?
[+] [-] WalterBright|7 years ago|reply
I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work.
I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoyed the crew by complaining that they'd changed course to avoid a storm.
[+] [-] kannanvijayan|7 years ago|reply
> "Why are you still working?"
The answer for me is simple - because I want to. I learned how to program at the tender age of 10 using a book that came with a C64 that my dad got for free from a garage sale.
Since those first years, the field at every turn has provided me with new intellectual challenges and as I've progressed I've accumulated different ideas and projects that I'd like to complete. That includes reasonably fleshed out ideas in bioinformatics, in distributed operating systems, in models for runtime type inference for dynamically typed programming languages, virtual machine construction techniques, and more.
I will never have enough time in my life to fully explore all of these - each of them will take years of dedicated effort to actually make something out of - so I have to pick and choose wisely to pursue the projects I care about given the opportunities presented to me.
My version of "cashing out" is basically sticking my money in a savings account and getting back to working on interesting things.. or if I have enough of it, using that money to pay some people to help me explore some of the more interesting things I have in my mental back pocket.
Some of us actually are passionate about our work. I suppose there are many that are in the field simply to make some big money and get out and live "the good life". I consider the life I would live doing that, and it just feels so soul-crushingly boring and insipid. What a waste of a life.
[+] [-] alanning|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molson8472|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramtatatam|7 years ago|reply
On the other hand I always thought the natural progression for the programmer is to move to higher abstraction level, become lead/coach/consultant... or start something on their own.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jondubois|7 years ago|reply
I'm almost 30 now and I've been working insanely hard since before I left school and during university; I've been working at least 70 hours per week for 12 years (40 hours on my startup or corporate contracting day job, 30 hours on a side project). I've had some minor successes but still no big break - I'm not far from where I left off financially.
One of the many companies I worked for is doing relatively well and I'm hopeful that my small stake will be worth enough to buy a modest house/apartment someday but it's still a big gamble at this stage; the shares could still become worthless... Even if everything goes perfectly well, it's still not enough for me to retire. I feel that I got very lucky with that one. I can clearly see how it's possible to get to 50 years old working nonstop like a freak and making all the right decisions and still not make it financially.
I've been quite strategic about my career so far. I worked for startups which had relatively low valuations, proven tech, value-creating areas, fast growth, good investors, smart founders, were just starting to onboard big clients and sign big contracts. I also worked for a few hyped SV startups too (I worked for a SV-based Y Combinator company for over a year).
Even among the 12 or so software companies that I worked at and left, none of them had successful exits yet or grew sufficiently that it would have allowed me to make enough money to retire (even if I could pick the best one and assume that I had been able to negotiate a good equity package). Only one startup I worked at is doing relatively well and that's also the one which I stayed at the longest and have the most equity in.
I feel that people who got a big break before they turned 30 missed out on learning about reality.
[+] [-] arconis987|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|7 years ago|reply
Recently I'm back to focusing more on coding. I find two things most interesting:
1. As I get older, I struggle with attention span and short-term memory more, but I have greater ability to see deep and widespread cross-cutting patterns. It's probably an even trade.
2. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that good coding is managing cognitive complexity. You're always trying to make it work, then make it easy to understand and maintain. When I think back on all of the multi-billion-dollars I've seen in project/program disasters, none of it was because the problems were hard. They were all a combination of poor customer/user participation and smart folks taking a problem of n complexity and making it into a problem of n^n complexity. Usually the two were related: tech was constantly used as sort of a band-aid to fix people problems. It never worked, but it kept a lot of coders employed for a long time.
Hopefully this wasn't cynical. I love coding and I love making useful things for people. I have a deep passion for helping developers lead happier and more productive lives. But I also feel an obligation to be honest about what happens. It looks a lot different at 50 than it did at 25.
Think about it. Seriously, would you want somebody telling you that you wasted three years of dev time and could scrap what you have and roll something useful to production in a month? I've done that several times in my career, at various ages, and nobody ever liked hearing it. As I got older they liked hearing it even less. In this business, inexperience, raw intelligence, and enthusiasm are the things we reward. They come mostly with younger folks.
Tech development is amazing and incredible because we create our own realities. But part of that awesomeness is the fact that left alone, we create realities that look like ourselves. It is the nature of the work.
[+] [-] taneq|7 years ago|reply
It depends on their attitude. The smarter the better, IMO, as long as they understand that the code they're writing isn't for them. They can go hack on some personal project if they want to flex their "I'm so clever" muscles, but if they're writing commercial code, that code is for the dumbest of the dumb who will ever have to maintain it. If someone can focus their intellect towards making their code clear and simple then great.
Of course, as you say, someone who's competent but has a slightly humbler intellect will just automatically write simpler code.
[+] [-] throwaway98121|7 years ago|reply
I’ve come across those types of people in my career. They were cancerous and didn’t last long. I’ve learned to tune out the noise and cut off people like that. Fortunately for me, I’ve never had run ins where these people had power over me. If they did, it’s a shitty company IMO to bring in people like that and I’m better off elsewhere.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|7 years ago|reply
When I look across the team, the more productive ones are those who keep their skills and tools up to date. Find a 30 year vet who can code the same routine in both Go and Python and you'll usually find a productive, dependable engineer who steers you around many gopher holes.
[+] [-] gdubs|7 years ago|reply
I’ve personally always felt incredibly fortunate to get to work with people who’ve been in the industry a long time; you can learn a lot from them. And while you sometimes can get a “step” on them with your youth, they’ll often school you with the fundamentals.
This is part of the diversity conversation — having a team composed of people from all walks of life is a competitive advantage. But it takes an enlightened “coach” to see it.
[+] [-] rb808|7 years ago|reply
Maybe the stock market has been way too successful in the last few decades. Ask a European or Japanese person about retiring early and living off the market.
(of course many 35 year olds are struggling to save for a house deposit let alone thinking about retiring)
[+] [-] chasing|7 years ago|reply
Also, wealth is the world's shittiest metric for success. I know a ton of people with incredible skills who work rather low-paying jobs because they want to improve the world, follow a particular passion, or whatever.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|7 years ago|reply
Well, there are other reasons. People you hire straight out of college tend to feel grateful, and also feel like they need to prove themselves (which is true). So they are usually willing to work extra hard. This can be a good quality, if nurtured properly with guidance and training.