engineer40

I got to meet Grace Hopper many years ago. She gave me a nanosecond after her talk. This was in the 1980s, probably while she was working for DEC. It made quite an impression on me, and it's now framed on the wall. I wish I'd gotten her autograph!

She was one of the original hackers. I don't think that she was a woman was ever relevant to her, and by the force of her personality, and her efforts, she made it irrelevant to everyone else. For instance, I keep forgetting it. Not that she was female, but that it was unusual that she was female. EG: she wasn't a "Pioneer of Female Programmers", she was instead simply a "Computer Pioneer".

I don't know the specific barriers she had to overcome, but I know they must have been significant-- for much of her career, people didn't really understand what computers even were. Even as late as the 1980s, talking heads on TV would often say things that implied they thought computers were intelligent, or other equally silly perspectives... because they were so new they had never been exposed to society at large. Now take that lack of understanding in the population in general and project it onto the navy which, as a military, is generally lower tech and more conservative? Of course she was in the research area, but there were certainly huge amounts of misunderstandings she had to deal with in people who simply had never been educated about computers. So she gave these talks that continued after she left the Navy and started working for DEC. She made it her mission to teach people about this new technology. I can't imagine her refusing to speak at a conference simply because there are more men than women-- I imagine most of the conferences she went to, she was the only female speaker.

PS- I think her handing out the nanoseconds was brilliant, as a teaching aid. She took an abstract concept and made it physical. How rare is that these days? Plus if you can give someone something they're much more likely to remember what you're trying to teach them. Even if it is a bit of old telephone wire... that mundane piece of plastic and copper became imbued with the story she told.

Quite and impression!

There was a previous demographic bubble when the dotcom era meant that all the jocks who would have become lawyers switched to getting CS degrees, despite not really being hackers. Now the same thing is happening, only they want to "do a startup".

I think it's common for youth not to trust older people, probably a byproduct of being raised by parents, and that combined with a desire to keep costs low and get maximum productivity (Eg: a deal in favor of the company at the engineers expense) go hand in hand to make hiring older people who would want a better deal less likely.

Inexperienced people don't value experience, because they lack the experience to know the value of experience.

Bay Area Startups hire inexperienced people because they are cheaper, and more willing to take a bad deal. (Experienced people are more likely to know a bad deal.)

These inexperienced people are the ones doing the interviewing (and often the ones running the companies) and so experience is not valued.

This is true, but one of the things I've observed about the hiring process for engineers over the past 25 years is this:

It's always sucked, and it's not getting better.

Example: Recruiters don't know anything about what it means to be a software developer, yet they feel they need to "weed out" the unqualified ones. So they do things like say "So, it says you know SQL, what database were they using at company X?" "OH, I'm sorry, this company is looking for Oracle SQL people, not Microsoft." --- in response to a job looking for Java developers who "know SQL". EG: You'd be writing code, probably dealing with an ORM, not writing too much SQL directly.

This problem has existed since the 1980s. Despite it creating massive inefficiencies in placement... the system hasn't (seemingly) gotten any better since then.

I've recently given up on applying for jobs with startups in Silicon Valley for this very reason.

I recently interviewed with one, which was supposed to be a "phone" interview. We did it over skype. No surprise, but the guy asked me to turn on video so we could have a video call. This really added nothing to the interview, was more a distraction than anything, but I got to see I was being interviewed by a 22 year old (with virtually no experience, I later discovered when I researched him online) and he could easily see my age.

The questions he asked were not discriminatory, but more along the lines of vague "technical" questions for which I would explain in detail ... detail that went over his head. Several times he assumed I got something wrong, mainly because of his lack of experience. For instance, explaining how to do something concurrently to someone who thinks in terms of threaded programming, they often don't see the issues, because they haven't done enough of it to see the terrible pain that can come with threaded solutions in certain situations.

In this case, I have been learning new things quite a bit. It's not a question of my skills being old, in fact, he asked me about a language I'd learned recently (I expect he thought this would trip me up), but I named one that I'm keen on, that has been in existence less time than the company I was interviewing with.

One of the great, fundamental problems of interviewing engineers is GIGGO-- if the interviewer is not a great engineer, and not a great interviewer, they will often presume an interview subject is not good based on their own ignorance. (ok engineers who are great interviewers don't suffer from this, of course.)

He also suffered from the problem of trying to ask the problem-solving questions, but describing the problem vaguely, or leaving key details out. OF course, in his mind, he knows the full problem, so he doesn't remember not telling me a key detail. In one case he asked me "how would you do X in Language Y"... to which I answered you couldn't, because the language didn't support it, but if you wanted to have a similar effect you could do this other thing, and here's the three things wrong, or dangerous about that approach. He then decided I'd gotten it wrong and told me how to do it in a whole other language than the one he specified in the question!

So, he's a poor interviewer, no doubt, but every single one of these questions, I'm sure, he assumed I got it wrong because I was older... it puts a spin on their perception of you completely.

Plus, I don't understand the contradiction that exists in startups-- they claim they want "great engineers", but they also want cheap engineers, and they also want young engineers.

One thing that makes me a good engineer is that I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and learned from them. I wouldn't discriminate against someone younger simply because they haven't made as many mistakes yet, but I don't discount the value of experience either.

It takes all kinds, and the monoculture that so many companies seem to seek is part of the movement to turn software development into an assembly line, and take it out of the realm of craftsmanship.

I think part of the cause of this is the easy funding for quick-to-flip ideas started by MBA types from Ivy League schools... that aren't really technology companies so much as a form of investor arbitrage. (EG: put money into an entity which uses the money to buy "traction" and then flip it to other investors or the M&A department at a large company using acquisitions as a way to hire.)

My conclusion is this: IF you're in your 30s, you can't just be an engineer anymore.

You need to start working into management, and become a manager if you want to work for others, or you need to become a founder.

Because by 40, you're on your own.