Age-friendly companies for older developers?

[southall]

If you go that route, you might have missed the part of my post where I made clear that THE MOMENT I MISS A QUESTION IN THE LONG INTERVIEW PROCESS I'M OUT OF THE DOOR WITHOUT SECOND THOUGHT.

You must interviewing only at places that are paying top rates, £700+ a day (in the UK)
Places that pay average or below average like £500 a day or less. Arent so fussy because they cant easily find good talent.

 

[kmiklas]

If you go that route, you might have missed the part of my post where I made clear that THE MOMENT YOU MISS A QUESTION IN THE 5-STAGES LONG, 3-HOURS PER STAGE WITH MULTIPLE TEAMS INTERVIEW PROCESS, YOU'RE OUT OF THE DOOR WITHOUT SECOND THOUGHT.

Yes missing questions is unacceptable.

 

[MoneyMatthew]

I currently contract with a team, average age probably 45.

Its not web development, more lower level desktop software that cant be done in a browser.

Interestingly they just hired a younger guy in his twenties for our team as they could not find anyone good in the older demographic that was their preference for experienced developers.

Every firm wants to hire the top 1% of programming talent, so regardless of how old you are if you are in the top 1% of performers they will probably want to hire you.

Younger people are generally cheaper and will work longer hours. So they have that advantage over older people.

But performance is more important.

With Git you can see the performance of every programmer, every line of code they have ever written while working for the company is all there only a few mouse click away.

By doing that i saw some developers were producing 50x the output of others.

In Boom times there is a shortage of talent and big budgets needing to be used. That is the time when average devs can easily find work regardless of age.

But during recessions it is very tough for everyone and even harder for older people.

You are American, right? I am not responding directly to something you said, rather, something you made me think of.

If you don't mind me asking, what is this obsession with speed of coding? Is that mainly a front-end/web developer thing? I understand projects have deadlines and speed counts, but what is up with these countless videos on youtube of devs tuning VIM/editors/IDEs as if they are about to enter the Indy 500? Shouldn't a few minutes be spent selecting readable/logical variable names and the architecture of the function/method itself? My question, is writing code at the speed of a court reporter actually a thing on your team? Or is it more about "here's what's on the burn-down chart for today...just get it done..."

 

[southall]

You are American, right? I am not responding directly to something you said, rather, something you made me think of.

If you don't mind me asking, what is this obsession with speed of coding? Is that mainly a front-end/web developer thing? I understand projects have deadlines and speed counts, but what is up with these countless videos on youtube of devs tuning VIM/editors/IDEs as if they are about to enter the Indy 500? Shouldn't a few minutes be spent selecting readable/logical variable names and the architecture of the function/method itself? My question, is writing code at the speed of a court reporter actually a thing on your team? Or is it more about "here's what's on the burn-down chart for today...just get it done..."

Im in London. But currently contract with a great US company.

There is this thing about extreme work ethic.
Jordan Peterson said in one of his videos that you can drop people with that kind of work ethic into the middle of a large forest. And all they would do is constantly go around chopping down trees for wood.
We got two guys with extreme work ethic in our team. Another 2 guys with high work ethic (me and one other guy). One guy who works at steady healthy pace, but can up the pace when needed, and finally 1 slacker.
I would be happy to work at a steady pace also. But i got two guys above me working insanely hard. So i have upped my game by 100%. Still not producing as much as them.
The funny thing is the company, or at least my managers, do not push anyone at. all. That is why the slacker gets away with slacking. Its a great company to work for especially if you are contractor like i am. The contractors can work from any where in the world anytime you want.

Personally i can easily output 1000 lines of quality code per week, with full test coverage.

Programming isnt that hard i been doing it since 1984 and got my Computer Science degree from one the best colleges in the world. And they tought us how to program properly.

 

[kmiklas]

Personally i can easily output 1000 lines of quality code per week, with full test coverage.

Betcha I could do the same in 200 sloc or less. Quality, not quantity my friend.

 

[southall]

Betcha I could do the same in 200 sloc or less. Quality, not quantity my friend.

Unlikely, I pride myself in using Occam's razor on ever bit of code i write.
Im always thinking how can i make this simpler without sacrificing anything else.

Very few other programmers do that. Most prefer to add extra layers of indirection and complexity.

 

[Sig]

I think there is a bit of a divide between the Google/Facebook/Microsoft world and the small tech company world. Most of my developers are over 40 for two reasons. First, the top 25 year olds "discriminate" against smaller companies like mine....they all want to be able to say they work for Google. Second, the big tech companies big D discriminate against software developers over 40. So I get better people than I'd normally be able to attract because they're being actively discriminated against elsewhere and they don't "discriminate" against me. As an added bonus, it you welcome older devs, pay them we'll, and treat them we'll they're incredibly loyal so turnover rate is almost non-existent. That's worth a lot, especially at a smaller company.