Huh? Im over 40 its only getting easier to get hired... Not sure where the ageism meme came from other than perhaps older generations who learned compsci pre the internet got left behind a little bit in the made takeoff of software. I am over 40 without a family or partner though, so I suspect the bias is far more about how much of your life is work energy.
What type of companies though? Because startups definitely seem to discriminate. I think partly because it's easier to convince a 20-something that working 6 days a week for mythical equity is a good deal.
But no employer has ever said "I just want an employee". So only someone naive in the extreme would imagine with the power dynamic in play the sales pitch isn't necessary. That a job is even advertised means the hardest part of the sell has already been done for you internally, but also probably has less favourable terms. If all you ever think is "I just want a job" you will almost always undersell yourself and have the worst jobs. The best ones aren't even advertised and are created purely on your own salesmanship.
I actually think there is a different effect at play which is the technical need is growing in seniority and complexity as people have large established software systems. The junior market has high accessibility but the senior actually takes a while to get anyone through the door. My current job had been advertised for 6 months, it needed a relatively insane set of knowledge and skills where I only really had maybe 50-60% of the ask. I literally had to learn all of GCP from scratch and I was still a better fit than you're likely to find. I think this is also the same trend AI is making worse as the demand for junior also goes down you'll see these averages climb as most hiring becomes more senior.
There is little debate the tech job market is currently bad, for juniors worse but for seniors too, widespread layoffs from large companies, etc.
What you are describing sounds more like the extreme pigeonholing the industry has been practicing for years, where companies expect 100% productivity from day one, use automated screening for keywords like "MongoDB" or "GCP" etc. How much effort does it really take to learn GCP enough to handle a certain given product, perhaps string together a few Cloud Run instances, a PR triggered CI pipeline with Cloud Build, add a few Compute Engine workers, bind everything together and protect it with Armor and IDS etc.? Not the entire GCP, just what a given company would need; it's adult Lego for god's sake. It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI.
The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity, since the labor was so mobile and relatively expensive. Maybe with a less mobile workforce, this will change but I won't hold my breath.
Sometimes I find the pigeonholing thing is just siloing and laziness. The last guy did our infra, nobody else wants to learn it, so the trivial thing to do is just hire on a tick-box basis.
I'm at a company now where one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch. Couldn't even be bothered to learn enough to hire for it. And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it.
Hate React if you want but come on guys, it's not a massively complex framework to learn the basics of.
> one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch.
React is close to an industry standard, sounds like bad management. Again, you don't have to know React to hire for React, just bring "smart and gets thing done" people onboard and trust them on their word that they can quickly learn anything they need to get it done. Clear responsibilities and goals, trust, swift consequences if that trust is breached.
Yes, I don't disagree. Well, it's a place where engineering has seized power through obstinance and used it to do whatever they find interesting or resume-positive. Luckily I'm just consulting here as a favor for an old friend.
> And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it.
Why do you need to specifically "hire for a framework"? Wouldn't any front-end developer be able to pick up any front-end framework (unless it's outside the javascript space entirely, and requires knowledge of purescript, rescript, elm, rust, clojure, scala, etc.)
I don't want to dox myself by getting too specific, but yes it's essentially a frontend framework for backend engineers in a niche lang (at least, niche for frontend). So they'd just hire more backend engineers in their language of choice.
I think this might actually be fine for internal tooling, but this is a customer-facing web app. It's now incredibly clunky and every feature takes an age to get out. Full page reloads for everything, etc.
> It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI.
> The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity
I guess it highly depends on where you are. Majority of the interviews I have attended were "We have this <problem>/<client request> and do not have expertise/capacity to solve/deliver. Can you come in and start closing tickets? yes/no". SRE with extensive experience in Ansible is barely eligible for a junior role at a shop using Puppet, a frontender working with Angular is unwanted at a react shop, Oracle DBA is a leper in the eyes of Postgres shop.
I am at my current place mostly because in the interview I have said "Hey look, buddy. I'm an engineer. That means I solve problems, not problems like "What is beauty?" Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy." My team does not have a single "Certified Foobarizer Expert", but tickets tend to move through the pipeline one way or another.
Errr its always been extremely true that social networking brings success. With far more value return than writing great code nobody knows about or uses.
I'd say there are converging standards like Parquet for longterm on disk, Arrow for in memory cross language, and increasingly duckdb for just standard SQL on that in memory or on disk representation. If I had to guess most of the data table things vanish long term because everyone can just use SQL now for all the stuff they did with quirky hacked up APIs and patchy performance because of those hacked up APIs.
This worked well for me for some things I've recently been learning/working on. One improvement I'd add is the citations of where information have come from aren't hyperlinks it would be very useful if they were!
A bigger problem in this respect with Wikipedia is it often cites secondary sources hidden behind an academic fire/paywall. It very often cites review articles and some of these aren't necessary entirely accurate.
Well also years of Wikipedia proving to be more accurate than anything in print and rarely and not for very long misrepresenting source materials. For LLMs to get that same respect they would have to pull off all of the same reassuring qualities.
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