> Young people starting out in the labor market often have The Fear that they will never find a job or never find a good job or another good job.
Young people fear it. Older people know it.
> Quit.
Not everyone is a 20-something silicon valley kid with companies falling all over themselves to throw money at them.
Hiring is effectively broken these days - especially in the software world.
If you're not from a top-flight university, maybe a little older, or in any other way less flashy/attractive in the job market, it can take months or sometimes years to get decent job interviews.
You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.
I thought older people are more valuable since they have more experience. There isn't much physical difference between 20, 40 and 55 year old people unless something like alzheimer kicks in, especially in our field where the job includes reading stuff and pressing button.
LoL, wait till you hit 50. I hope it doesn't come as too much of a shock. Do what you can to save up as much money as you possibly can in your 20s, 30s and 40s because it becomes a lot harder to find gigs when you hit 50 (even mid 40s in many cases).
I'm in my mid-50s. Took me 9 months to find a gig a couple years ago when I was looking. Now to be completely honest that's also because I can afford to be pretty picky at this point and I was only applying for stuff that looked really interesting. And if it looked like there was just too much bullshit I wasn't interested. When you hit your 50s you've seen a lot of bullshit in your time and can smell it a mile away. So yeah, it works both ways. There's definitely ageism, but many of us who are aged have saved up enough so we are also picky about what we want to take.
I'm currently between gigs again (previous contract may come back when they get funding so I'm kind of biding my time because that was a good place to work and good places to work can be hard to find). I don't want to call it quits and retire just yet, but I'm finding less and less that's non-bullshit out there these days. And the way interviewing is done these days... well, let's just say it makes me want to retire. I like the work, but I hate the interviewing.
The often cited reason is that young people are easier to manipulate and exploit (overtime, passion, kool-aid about the company "mission" etc.), or more charitably phrased are more "adaptable" and less set in their ways.
They have fewer responsibilities, no family etc. They are more idealistic and don't have the same cynical/sour/realist/seeing-through-the-bullshit outlook that older people have.
For hiring discrimination? I mean, that’s kind of a hard question to answer.
Personally I think there are lots of people who have an idea in their head (not always consciously) of what a hotshot developer looks like. And it’s not the old guy. And I think this manifests as concerns about “culture fit” or being overqualified or other vague objections.
We ALL have biases. It’s on hiring managers and HR departments and all of us to actively work to minimize their effects. This is hard to do and, unfortunately, some people don’t care to try.
But certainly there are other reasons too. Bias in hiring is a tough problem.
>>I thought older people are more valuable since they have more experience. There isn't much physical difference between 20, 40 and 55 year old people
Older people have families, don't buy the "lets work 20 hours a day," or "we're a startup" despite being founded in 2000 or whatever, and that's a liability to some. (Another thing, is that they might be less willing to take orders from their 23 year old boss.)
My personal experience is that the very best managers use "asking questions" as their main management tool as this is effective to reveal all aspects of a situation and get employees to understand and support the decisions that follow.
Weak managers like to "take decisions" as a display of their value as a manager. This value elevation is undermined by old experienced employees who can point out bad decisions or that the manager doesn't understand the consequences of the decisions, i.e. a fear of being "exposed". Weak managers fear anything that makes them seem weak, like asking questions.
Definitely true on the not putting up with bullshit part. As a 50 something I find I have no patience anymore for bullshit. Companies prefer younger folks because they're so much easier to manipulate and control.
I'm very sympathetic to this perspective. If your options are:
1. Stay at unethical job you hate.
2. Get a new job you don't hate.
Well, the answer is pretty obvious. But there is a deeper challenge, which is the choice between:
1. Stay at unethical job you don't hate.
2. Damage/destroy your career and job prospects.
This latter scenario is really a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It forces you to pick. Would you rather be virtuous (i.e. ethical), or be paid?
> You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.
Sure you can. You just choose not to -- and (IMO) that's fine.
Given the trouble we have hiring, it’s hard for me to imagine someone qualified to be a median talent software engineer would have trouble easily finding new employment elsewhere. (The median interview candidate is much, much worse than the median engineer because the worse you interview, the more frequently you show up on interview loops.)
If you’re median or better and in a city with a reasonable tech scene, you are probably going to have a straightforward path. If you’re median or better and not where tech is, look for remote jobs (admittedly harder) or move where tech is.
If your skills are notably below the median, staying put and working on your skills might be the most sensible course and changing jobs once you can interview and place well.
How many people respond to your job ads? Where I live (major US metropolis), it's about 200-700 per job (according to linkedin, anyways).
The biggest trouble for a soft. eng is getting to a real person. Once that is done, convincing them that you're median or better is the easy part. Most resumes are just screened out by a machine, or reviewed by a clueless HR dept that has no idea what a median-talent software engineer looks like.
I have taught hundreds of CS undergrads in this city, and have had some of the very brightest tell me they've put out 500-600 resumes, and never heard back a thing. Many do get jobs though - even some of the worst performers.
It's very hit-and-miss - not nearly as deterministic as you make it sound.
I totally agree with your points, especially the last, and didn’t mean to suggest it was deterministic at all.
Interviewing is a lossy, semi-random practice for both sides. Candidates and firms take different approaches to address this randomness, but it’s still ultimately not a digitally precise (repeatable) not even especially accurate system. You could be the next Jon Carmack and fail to get an offer from 10 straight interviews for relevant positions. “Too experienced; we don’t really do what he’s interested in; bad culture fit; too good culture fit-we want more diversity; simply preferred another candidate; decided to not move forward with the role; lost the budget; existing employee transferred; never was a real open position anyway but we legally had to advertise it...”
What else are they supposed to do? Apply to the same job again? There's little you can do if you never make contact or hear back. You just apply to other positions. But what if you don't hear from those either ... ?
Open to suggestions here - but no stalker advice, please - I do not condone friending hiring managers on linkedin/fb, or some of the other creepy tactics we've seen recently.
I think the skillful students generally believe that investing effort to become skillful is all that's needed - and that doing so will eventually pay off.
This is sadly not really true as a general statement.
I have had many 'successful' students - who got more than one offer to choose from. Once, I asked one - who now works at a major investment bank - "so, great job - any advice I should pass on to other students if they ask about job-hunting?" (taking note for myself also - as I am a soft. eng mainly, and only teach part-time).
I expected something like "invest in your skills" or python, or java, or databases, or interview questions ...
The response was: "yeah - copy and paste the job description to the bottom of your resume, and turn the font color to white - so humans can't see it, but the machine will still read it and label you a good match for the job".
My point here is that the current system seems to work best for those who 'game' it to behave in unintentional ways - as opposed to filtering for actually skillful applicants.
Are you sure that many resumes of qualified candidates aren't screened out prior to making it to your desk? Hiring websites are awful. And there's absolutely no quality control - how do you even know who's not making it through who probably should be? Is anybody actually doing that kind of testing?
> (The median interview candidate is much, much worse than the median engineer because the worse you interview, the more frequently you show up on interview loops.)
Not sure I understand what you're saying here. People who haven't needed to interview in a long time are probably not good at interviewing but good engineers nonetheless. Conversely, people who are good at interviewing might be because they've had a lot of practice.
If you assume some correlation, even imperfect, between SWE effectiveness and interview performance, the least effective SWEs are likely to both be looking for work more often and require more interviews per successful job search, so will be way over-represented in the “who applies to interview” pool.
Joel Spolsky said it well: “A lot of companies think they're hiring the top 1 percent because they get 100 resumés for every open position. They're kidding themselves. When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions.“
Don't pay much attention to what Sokoloff said. In theory, he's kinda right, but that's not how it works in the real world. And I don't know if you and him/her live in the same area/country.
I've had a rough time looking for jobs, due to 2 main reasons: not getting it right when adapting the resume to a job posting. Many ATS just discard resumes that doesn't have the exact words that they use on the job posting. Even if you are saying the same thing with different words...
The other was the phone interviews, made by a HR person looking for who knows what. For most applies that I did, I didn't get a phone interview. After phone interviews, didn't hear back.
I only got 2 technical interviews for like, 100 applications. One was for the job I'm currently in, the other I declined because I got the job offer to my current job. Both I got through recommendations, even if the people recommending me didn't know me. But they looked at my resume and put it stray to the HR manager for them to talk to me.
I also had a friend (not in IT) that was not getting anything. I told he to look for recommendations. She went to LinkedIn, found someone that worked or used to work at a company she wanted to go, and talked to the person, got recommended, and got the job.
> my age has never been brought up. Not even once IIRC
No one will ever bring it up.
Do you really think someone will take on the liability of discussing your [age|race|sex|sexual orientation] in an interview? ESPECIALLY as a reason to NOT hire you?
> You don't need to be a 20-something to land a good job.
Agreed. However, your chances drop precipitously as you age.
Studies have found this to be the case repeatedly - with very little evidence to the contrary.
> You just need to be somewhat good at what you do.
This is a vague statement that makes your premise unfalsifiable. If someone is not hired because of ageism, it is always possible to say they weren't good enough at their jobs, because good enough is never defined.
It's not illegal to mention it. It's illegal to not hire someone for that reason. For that reason, mentioning it would be stupid, whether you are discriminating illegally or not, and so it's a common misconception that mentioning or asking certain questions is illegal.
> What do you do if you find yourself inside a maze?
> Quit. Seriously. Go do something else. Ideally, do it today.
That's it, right there. The whole article could have been replaced with just that.
I've heard people express the opinion that they have absolutely "no choice" but to work at McKinsey, or some random hedge fund. I don't understand how anybody can reasonably come to that conclusion. The worst case for people like this is making only medium six figures.
HA! I appreciate your perspective and comment. I'm nearly 3 years into wall street and, while on the lower end of the payscale, I KNOW that if I pursue the more ambitious high six, low seven figure lifestyle, I will have to 'play the game'.
People who claim they have no choice but to play the game have already decided they will tolerate it as much as possible.
One way to avoid poverty in that case would be to not buy a yacht, for example. Any amount of money is nearly poverty level if you spend it all on luxuries.
Edit: I am dumb and completely missed the joke. Poe's law in action!
At some point I decided that there's a fundamental difference between working for the government vs. private industry. I'm happy doing much the same thing for the government that I was unhappy doing in private industry or for a government contractor, because it no longer makes sense to give up. To a lot of people, the maze may look the same, but in one case, it's always worth trying to fix, and in the other the whole thing is dispensable.
The maze aspect of a situation, or the immorality aren't really the important things! The thing that matters is whether you have a purpose in participating, to make anything better. When a private company is going down the tubes, there's an inherent non-linear and self-fulfilling type of behavior where people give up when they think others are giving up. It makes a large difference in what can be achieved when giving up is not an option for a significant number of people.
I am convinced that people who write things like this don't believe intelligence is genetic. You no more earned how smart you are than you earned your race.
Wisdom? Determination? Scars? You can claim to earn or learn some of those.
Don't get me wrong, I am not aligned with the hnn society of smart idiots who think Harrison Bergeron was a how-to manual. The genetic dice roll can be cruel. I don't look like Clooney nor am I built like The Rock. But them's the breaks. The only thing worse than that unfairness is the unfairness well meaning and smart idiots would create trying to rectify the inequities.
Still, I am empathetic enough to be amused by rantings of the intelligent regarding economic options when they seem to have not seriously considered some other people are less intelligent and may really have less options.
In the abstract I will side with those who declare no one is trapped. But there is a continuum.
You pretty much have to get me to Vichy France or San Francisco levels of disgusting society before I advocate a waitress with a 6th grade education just decides that supporting the evils of Cheesecake Factory is beyond the pale and worth joining the resistance, the kid's be damned.
Seems to me some of these smarty pants could create a utopia for the lesser folks who feel trapped by mortgage's, child support and other meaningless pursuits instead of wasting their horse power on blogs.
There is a genetic component, but nobody is born looking like Clooney or the Rock. At the movie star level it is basically your full time job to look that way with personal trainers, nutritionists, steroids, whatever you need.
This depends a lot on what kind of society you live in and how good welfare / free education options you have around you. In most western countries you can go to school, get student aid, and switch careers to something satisfying even if you are starting from a 0 budget.
The unwillingness to acknowledge that intelligence is genetic (as are many psychological attributes) has completely neutered any meaningful discussion on a variety of very important issues.
That's not how it works with children. Unless you have abortion easily available for poor people and sterilisation easily available for folks that don't want children... you might not have a choice. If you are male, you can't force stop an accidental pregnancy. Luckily, though, male sterilisation is quite effective. It is generally more difficult for females to get sterilized (especially if you aren't married and/or don't have children), it has more risk of failure, is more invasive, and is more expensive. All other birth control methods can fail - people get pregnant on the pill. Condoms break. And so on. Your employer might not even cover birth control.
And these things don't even begin to cover things like rape, incest, and underage pregnancy where a guardian doesn't allow abortion.
Children are not always preventable
Other folks have already addressed the medical problems, so I'm gonna pass on it.
It is a ridiculous expectation to expect folks not to have sex, and as such, not included. This is a basic urge of people, and while some folks choose not to, most do not. If it were that simple, abstinence only education would include coping skills to avoid rather than shaming and would have a much better track record.
Not having sex is simply not a viable option for most people - especially so within the confines of a committed romantic relationship. In fact, it is an easy way to void such a relationship in most cases.
> Most medical problems are arguably preventable as well.
That's a huge stretch. You could say that for most illnesses we have some idea how to reduce the risk, but there is still an overwhelming amount of luck involved.
(And that's before we even get into the luck-based factors that make lower-risk behaviours harder or easier for different people.)
I'm under the impression that the vast majority of significant medical problems, in the US anyways, are associated with obvious risk factors such as obesity, sedentary lifestyle, and alcohol/tobacco consumption.
Uh huh. You come back in fifteen years and tell us how that's going for you, sport.
Most of what I need doctors or other quasi-medical professionals to assist with is congenital or... wait for it... sports related. Turns out that 'get plenty of exercise' doesn't automatically fix everything. And it's harder to manage 'plenty' once you get older and everything fucking hurts.
So many of my older friends have informed me that my definition of 'everything hurts' is adorable that I'm starting to worry that they're right when they tell me that I haven't seen anything yet.
There is just so much lack of general awareness about the things that can go wrong with your body once you're past the midpoint. Most young people are oblivious, just like I used to be.
Now I'm 40, and this Sunday night I start seeing double when gazing above the horizon. After finding an opthalmologist who would see me immediately and getting MRIs and blood tests, it is diagnosed as idiopathic optical inflammatory syndrome and mostly treatable (although it tends to come back). I suppose I should be happy it's not a tumour in my brain.
The critical ingredient between the two sides in such debates is that one side believes that hard work is all you need to be successful, and the other side thinks it’s hard work and luck. And doesn’t tolerate the micro aggression or outright aggression exhibited by people who have both but their fragile egos can’t stand that they are anything but self-made, full stop.
There are things in my life that have gone spectacularly well, and some that have gone pretty badly. So here’s me in the middle, with a pretty okay life that others envy, but the bootstraps people look down on.
The major disease most strongly associated with a known, avoidable risk factor that I can think of is lung cancer. And Wikipedia tells me that
> The vast majority (85%) of cases of lung cancer are due to long-term tobacco smoking.[4] About 10–15% of cases occur in people who have never smoked.[14] These cases are often caused by a combination of genetic factors and exposure to radon gas, asbestos, second-hand smoke, or other forms of air pollution.
So even for lung cancer, a significant minority of sufferers have never smoked. Genetic factors are obviously out of one's control, and the others mentioned can be pretty damn hard to avoid, especially if you're poor and/or born in the wrong place.
> I would have gone for Atherosclerosis instead of lung cancer personally.
Okay, but that isn't fully within anyone's control either, and you're still ignoring the diseases that are predominantly genetic, the ones that happen more or less randomly as far as we can tell, the ones caused by environmental factors in childhood, and all the people who get a 'preventable' disease despite doing what they could do avoid it.
I'll stop arguing after this though, I think we're either talking past each other about the definitions of 'vast majority' and 'preventable', or having an unspoken argument about the general attitude we should adopt toward people with health problems, or at a factual impasse that we can both google our way around if we care enough.
Some people are so compelled to have kids that they don’t have a choice in the matter at all.
Personally my wife and I chose not to have kids, but we know many more people who had to have kids than those who felt they had a choice in the matter.
FWIW, this author seems to use the terms "moral maze" and "immoral maze" interchangeably, which makes their writing harder to follow than it needs to be.
EDIT: On rereading, that page only offers an implicit definition of the term.
Basically, it's an organization that is steeped in perverse incentives. Most individuals are incentivized to behave in ways that are detrimental to society and to the long-term profitability of the organization, and the corporate culture implicitly accepts this.
The article touched on something that's always bothered me about the "effective altruism" movement: some of its adherents seem to think it's OK to work literally anywhere as long as you contribute enough of your income to worthy causes. That has always seemed incredibly dubious to me: make the world a worse place so you can make it a better place!
It just comes from a focus on marginal effects (my replacement at evilcorp will probably do roughly as good a job, and probably not give a large fraction of his/her income to charity) and caring about actual outcomes for the people you're trying to help, rather than your own personal purity.
Like everything, the approach can be abused (I feel fine about taking this high-paying morally dubious job, because I'm earning to give... but oh wait, now I have a family to support, and the cost of living is surprisingly high here, and I've got to wear good suits and drive a decent car or my professional reputation might suffer...) but a lot of people are sincere about it, and it does make sense.
Do you know of models of utilitarianism that maintain strict lines of cause and consequence?
What bothers me about some utilitarian perspectives is the lumping outcomes together of outcomes, based on vague definitions of benefit and harm, instead of keeping the effects strongly tied to their causes.
If you take that approach joining a company, you better know how much of the company money passes through you, and you better spend it very ethically and keep track of the development of the ethics of the company.
"Knowing a tree by its fruits" and all.
AFAICT it's the philosophical blind spot that got us parallel construction (an illegal US police practice), manufacturing evidence based on desired convictions, to reach a desired monetary, political or personal end.
There's also a New Age concept for it, it's called "spiritual bypass". "If only I'm spiritual enough, I can do whatever I want", or "if the Lord wanted my garden to bloom he'd water it, I did my part praying".
In psychological terms it's called "rationalization". I don't think it's an avoidable abuse as long as you don't do your own bookkeeping.
Sorry, I only saw this today. I don't think I fully understand your question, though -- can you clarify? I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'keeping the effects strongly tied to their causes'/maintaining 'strict lines of cause and consequence', vs. 'lumping outcomes together'. So the rest of the comment is obscure to me, because I can't follow the connections you're making.
Is part of your point that we should be as precise as we can about the effects of our actions, tracing lines of causality at the highest possible resolution? I agree with this in principle (allowing for the fact that improving our knowledge isn't costless, so it will rarely be worthwhile to literally maximise it), but I think usually all we realistically have is a best guess, maybe a rough probability distribution for the outcome of each action. And throwing that out because it's uncertain would be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, IMO.
"The lumping together of outcomes in roughly two boxes, while also discarding information about the specific actions that lead to the outcomes."
Once this has been done, there is no longer a line back from the outcomes ("buying food") to the actions that led to it ("receiving a salary"). Or "finding a job for some or other purpose", which leads to "working for company X", and then "receiving salary from company X", and then assuming part of the responsibility for the actions of "company X" by spending the money earned there.
I know almost no one who considers where their money comes from, and then actually implements steps to make their spending habits congruent with that.
Ethical use of money does not just involve spending it at the right places, it also involves earning it in a way congruent with where you spend it, e.g. keeping track of where the money originates from. Companies do not create money and everyone who works for them knows this.
For instance, if I receive money from place A which is involved in studying agriculture, if I then spend it in a place which is agriculturally underdeveloped, anything I accidentally reveal about agriculture to the place where I spend my money is well placed.
In the same vein, if I'm part of a criminal underworld involved in child trafficking and prostitution, I should not be spending it on schools, even if it were possible to keep the two worlds completely isolated in all my other actions. Thinking such a total isolation is implementable by hand without actually knowing you can do it and how, is highly unwise and a sure sign of an overgrown ego.
Taking money from one place and moving it to another just creates an undeniable and indestructible trace from place A to place B. If you are not a perfect filter to things which are at place A and should never be at place B, you are responsible for any and all harm caused, through willful ignorance of the fact that companies make money in cooperation with the society they function in.
To give you a simpler example, if I'm developing software that pushes some kind of social frontier, it makes sense for me to import my food from the most socially backwards countries, so that I don't accidentally mistake the actual problem space for "just my backyard". Because then I literally owe my food to the support of a country which has bigger social problems than I do personally.
Ideally this makes the software I develop less complex, I get a wider picture of the problem which makes it harder to even consider complicating the solution, and it helps aim my attention more precisely in ways which are known-good.
However, if I only were to consider the outcomes of my actions, such as great software or great tasting food, I may be effective at producing sharp weapons but not so much at producing tools for peaceful ends.
It's consequentialist reasoning, not necessarily utilitarian. And you don't have to be a thoroughgoing consequentialist to agree that in a world full of preventable misery, it's best to focus on actually preventing it, rather than on keeping your own hands as clean as possible. (And realistically we're talking about working for an oil company or a casino or something, not being a Nazi prison guard.)
Lately it seems like many in the "effective altruism" movement has gone down a rabbit hole of AI crackpottery. These people will tell you with a straight face that a postulated runaway malevolent AI is the greatest threat to humanity.
Meanwhile, mankind continues gradually burning itself to death and the most advanced machine learning algorithms in the world recommend I buy a different edition of the book I just bought.
Do they need to be so complex? Would it not make as much sense for Intel to be broken up into a large number of individual autonomous entities that then cooperate with each other on their own terms?
Worker owned co-ops will indeed solve this problem, because they are very hard to scale. So they won't ever reach the level where mazes are a real problem. This being said, they also have the potential to come with their own set of issues - trying to get a bunch of people to decide things is also a very time consuming endeavor.
I'm also cynical enough to think that taking all the "moral people" out of one workplace / school / whatever and forming a "moral maze / company" will still not be a utopia...
Young people fear it. Older people know it.
> Quit.
Not everyone is a 20-something silicon valley kid with companies falling all over themselves to throw money at them.
Hiring is effectively broken these days - especially in the software world.
If you're not from a top-flight university, maybe a little older, or in any other way less flashy/attractive in the job market, it can take months or sometimes years to get decent job interviews.
You can't just walk away from a decent income because idealism.