[nsgi]

Obviously very good that Chrome was delivered without people doing lots of overtime. However, a lot of his argument seems to be about the age of the management, and surely ageism is illegal and it should be about the person's skills rather than being old enough to have school-aged kids or even how many decades of experience they have

Edit: Okay, I guess the kind of ageism he is suggesting isn't illegal in the US, but it is in the UK and is still generally considered unethical

[kelnos]

He frames it in a way that kinda sounds age-ist-y, but I think it's less about age and more about experience (he was using age as a proxy for experience, which isn't always true, but is close enough, often enough).

I had my first "senior software engineer" title when I was 28, and that was after I'd only been writing code professionally for a few years (in my early 20s I had a campus coding job at my university, and then I was doing a lot of open source work through my mid 20s, but not sure I'd call any of that "professional"). At my most recent job, I saw most developers making it to the senior in their late 20s, and many even making it to "staff" (one level above senior at our shop) by 30, or soon after. That's ridiculous. In my mind, most people should be hard pressed to develop the experience to really be "senior" in something before they're in their mid to late 30s.

Now, I certainly don't mind (from the standpoint of prestige and salary) that I somehow ended up with the title of "principal software engineer" (one level above "staff") when I was 33, but... c'mon. When you've nearly tapped out your career ladder by the time you're 35 (unless you move to management), it feels like there's something not right there.

[turndown]

The truth is that these are all meaningless titles once you consider people change jobs. Some people won’t accept ever going to a lesser position and stay at a company(unless forced out by circumstance) but those who switch generally experience some reshuffling in “rank” when they leave.

If you left the company you work for right now(other than to start your own company) you could find yourself as a staff engineer(one level below) somewhere with an accelerated path to the next level maybe, or in an equivalent role, although this is more difficult just because there are fewer positions and more filters to being hired.

[jsty]

I won't try and read into whether or not there's ageism anywhere in the tweet stream, but certainly when talking about hiring the magic words are "find experienced engineers to run it". This is very much legal and ethical in the UK - we're not precluded from setting an experience-based hiring bar. I'm sure if a 25 year old had come along with two browsers under their belt they'd gladly have been hired into a leadership role too.

[gridspy]

There is currently ageism within the software industry (esp. startups). Older people (apparently) find it hard to get jobs. Part of the justification for that refusal is that young people will allow death-marches.

His argument assumes you are aware of the youth bias, and is gently pushing against the ageism by pointing out that senior software engineers have a LOT of useful knowledge.

[teh_klev]

> Part of the justification for that refusal is that young people will allow death-marches.

Where I work the young team are sticking hard to their contracted hours (nothing wrong with that). It's the seniors that pull the extra (but not mad) hours to get shit completed.

[kube-system]

I know that this is a real problem, but I also wonder if this perception is also perpetuated by selection bias.

People with established careers in tech often change job through their established networks, and especially when they are highly sought after.

So it may very well be that the strongest senior candidates’ resumes never reach your inbox, while it’s more likely that strong junior candidates have no other option.

[eterevsky]

What he writes about is seniority, not ageism. It's about whether to incentivize career paths in which senior engineers keep doing technical work.

[olliej]

Seniority doesn't mean "senior", it's a product of expertise. Obviously there is a strong age correlation because generally going up seniority ladder is going to correlate with time at company, and domain knowledge/expertise is going to be correlated with time spent work in that field.

But I know plenty of people my age (my vintage? :D) with higher and lower seniority, similarly I know people older, and people with more time at the company in the industry with substantially lower seniority, and vice versa.

But also the companies I've worked at (FAANGs, so obviously large) don't treat "seniority" at the IC level as giving some kind of priority over lower seniority ICs. Obviously seniority factors into "how reasonable/accurate is their opinion" but that has never, in my experience, been a blanket override of lower "seniority".

The primary real difference is compensation, which is why companies like to get rid of senior engineers. I assume for a competent company they're doing a trade off "how much do they cost vs. how much value do they add", but obviously where we see this is always poorly managed "get rid of all the expensive people, WCGW" policies.

[rvnx]

Maybe the secret is not really about the age or management skills, but rather that Chrome is an insanely profitable product (+ in a monopoly) so the pressure is rather low compared to a startup. Additionally whether a specific feature is ready or not for a specific cycle is not that important considering that there are releases every 6 weeks and even before for metrics gathering activities.

[Cederfjard]

The author of the tweets is talking about when Chrome was first delivered, no? It wasn’t profitable, nor a monopoly, before it had come out.