职业与工作方法rachelbythebay.com
硅谷如何对待有经验的资深员工
How the Valley treats experienced people
2018 — 2024，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
Rachel by the Bay 的这篇文章讨论硅谷科技行业如何对待有经验的年长工程师：大多数人既不是惨败者也不是传奇成功者，只是需要谋生的普通人，但行业却常以“是否暴富/成功”来评判年长开发者。文章及其评论揭示了科技行业普遍存在的年龄歧视现象。
为什么经久不衰：年龄歧视是每个开发者终将面对的问题，这篇多年反复登上首页的文章提醒我们：普通而持续地做好工作本身就是体面的，不值得被“没成功”的叙事羞辱。
HN 评论精选
绝大多数人都是普通人，用“是否成功”评判年长工程师既荒谬又不公平
我觉得作者是在回应扎克伯格那句“年轻人更聪明”的著名言论。我喜欢 Rachel 的观点在于她直击要害：无论在哪个领域，我们绝大多数人既不会惨败也不会大获成功，更可能只是需要谋生、每天有事可做的普通人。我今年 58 岁，仍在做 SRE 和开发。我很幸运在一家多元的公司工作，但我也知道有人会看着我这把年纪还“没成功”而疑惑。可没人会奇怪隔壁镇那位老鞋匠为什么每天还起来修鞋。
markbnj查看英文原文
I kind of feel like the author is referring to Zuckerberg's famous comment about young people being smarter. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was suitably shocking and stupid so it's a candidate anyway. The thing I like about Rachel's take on this is that she gets right to the key thing: regardless of what field you're in, or how you spend your time, the vast majority of us are going to be neither horrible failures nor amazing successes. We're far more likely to just be ordinary human beings, who probably need to earn a living and have something useful to do every day. Fwiw I'm 58 and a working site reliability engineer and developer. I don't really live paycheck to paycheck, but neither can I just quit working and go instagramming about the globe. I'm fortunate to work for a very diverse company that values everyone for what they can contribute, but I am also cognizant of the people who will look at me and wonder why the greybeard never "made it." Those people probably won't "make it" either, and anyway, nobody seems to wonder why the old Italian guy in the town next to us still gets up every day and fixes shoes.
没暴富不等于能力差，运气和财务时机往往比技术更能决定财富
有时你没能攒够提前退休的钱，只是运气不好加上财务决策失误。我总是晚一步加入公司、错过低价期权，眼睁睁看着几十个前同事成了千万富翁。互联网泡沫时我曾是“纸面”百万富翁，但锁定期内股价从 75 美元跌到 0.75 美元。另一家公司我 7 美元的期权涨到 60 美元却因贪心没卖，离职时只剩 8 美元。我几乎一直是最优秀的开发者之一，却从没赚到“财务自由”的钱。
shmat查看英文原文
Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options. I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a company. I also was a "paper" millionaire during the dot-com boom. The start-up where I worked was bought making my options worth millions. There was a 6 month lock out and during that time the stock price went from $75 to $0.75. My options were at $2. Did that make me a bad developer? At another company I had options at $7. The stock peaked a few years later at $60. I never exercised any because I was greedy. I was going to cash out when it hit $75. When I left the company after 6 years, the stock was at $8. All in all, I was almost always one of the best developers, but I never made "FU" money. I did learn to exercise options as soon as they were worth a decent amount, but never made enough to be rich that way. I'm sure there are many old developers who were as dumb financially as I was.
招聘流程系统性歧视年长工程师，薪资甚至低于应届生
在波士顿科技圈，年龄歧视非常普遍，还有没上过 MIT/哈佛的精英主义歧视。被明显经验远不如你的人面试、看他们机械套用招聘“剧本”，极其令人沮丧。很多公司的招聘流程实际上就是在把年长的人筛出去。而且拿到 offer 时，薪水还明显低于毕业两三年的年轻人。这行业仿佛只想要有两三年经验的人，有点像好莱坞。
taude查看英文原文
Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of Elitism if you didn't go to MIT or Harvard, too. I'd like to think more about this and write dome some elegant thoughts, but... I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way less experience and people applying their hiring "playbook" without much thought. I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers. Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. It's almost as if the tech industry wants most of the people to have two or three years experience. I've been equating it to working in Hollywood to some. Still trying to figure out where I went wrong in my career, but as others have said below, not all startups you work for succeed, not all companies you create succeed, lock-up periods, senior executive corruption (I worked for a publicly traded company where the CFO actually went to jail), etc.
面试流程把所有人当应届生对待，应改为在熟悉环境中实测真实能力
我财务自由但仍喜欢工作。搬到硅谷九年，面试了五六次都没拿到 offer，最后自己开了公司。面试流程似乎默认我是应届本科生——有一次明知我从没用过 Ruby，还让我调试 Ruby 代码。唯一的例外是 Triplebyte，他们的技术面试好得多：评估写代码能力就该让人用熟悉的环境写代码。想考察学习新环境的能力？雇我做两周承包商做个真实项目就行。
lisper查看英文原文
I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code despite the fact that I told them well in advance that I have never worked with Ruby. There was one notable exception, and that was my experience with Triplebyte. They have a much better technical interview process than any I have seen anywhere else. There is really only one way to assess someone's ability to write code, and that is to have them write code in a language and environment with which they are already familiar. Modern coding is so complex and requires so much infrastructure that productivity hinges as much or more on the impedance match between a person and their environment as it does on their actual abilities. Even the most brilliant coder will stumble if they use emacs day to day and you force them to use vi. If you want to assess my ability to come up to speed on a new environment, I have a solution for that too: hire me as a contractor and give me a week or two to do a real project for you. I really don't understand why more companies don't do that.
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