Can you do another good deed and require your posters to include salary range in their job ads?
It's the norm in the UK and we successfully forced this in Poland (though posters almost NEVER post salaries here). How? The companies need IT staff so much that almost all IT job boards (at least the most popular ones - like FB groups or https://nofluffjobs.com) started requiring the salary range.
I think your idea is praiseworthy, but I'd never ever create a website like this with hidden salaries. Especially in your case - it's so cool people post jobs on your board, but what if they do so, because they're offering 10, 20, 40% less because it's a place for "old geeks that noone wants"?
I'm really super proud that if a IT ad in Poland has no salary range most of us just ignore it. And it took us maybe 2 years to get to this place. I think every other country should follow the lead and end the "competitive salary" trend. I don't want to spend 3 days on interviews just to discover that the salary offered is way too low for me. Salary missing from an ad is a big lack of respect, the sooner people realize that the better.
No. A salary range requirement isn't customary in the U.S., and I'm in no position to enforce one at such an early stage.
I'll make it an option though, and I'll include the salary data that StackOverflow ads make available when they do. I definitely prefer seeing a salary range when I look for jobs.
>> I'd never ever create a website like this with hidden salaries. ...what if they do so, because they're offering 10, 20, 40% less because it's a place for "old geeks that noone wants"?
In my experience, the risk of wage exploitation decreases with age. Unfortunately, a lot of younger workers are paid lower than less skilled, but older workers simply because of lack of seniority and/or negotiating skills.
But, I must say such "what ifs" are silly in business. What if your anticipation of a nonexistent problem is the cause of your inaction?
I'm not being snarky so much as serious. I've been in a number of meetings where I had to cede to someone's "what if" when the alternative was a cheap and measurable test. Cheap and measurable tests are the primary thrust of my blog post.
>Unfortunately, a lot of younger workers are paid lower than less skilled, but older workers simply because of lack of seniority and/or negotiating skills.
I'd say that younger workers were exploited a bit historically because they were largely unaware of their own market rates and didn't have a viable way to find out. That is changing remarkably fast through sites like Glassdoor and self-reported salary data on various other sites.
I think it would be good to add an optional salary range field and then you could test how many people fill it in. You could even try and scrape existing posts to see who has put it in the description.
Then you could allow candidates to filter/sort on it. Or even better, prioritise jobs with salary above those keeping it secret, highest at the top.
We require a salary on Cleanweb Jobs and it hasn't put that many companies off. However, we're mainly UK focused and a lot of job ads already list a salary here.
Just my 2c -- I'm in the US and I disagree. For example, many of the jobs allow for a very broad experience.
For example, in my current job, we are often looking for a smart, energetic people to work on X. Someone with a BS just out of college? An engineer with 10 years of matching experience? Tech lead wo just built X elsewhere? We will take either (if we like them) and adjust responsibilities instead.
This approach requires either creating multiple postings (a pain; we do not need so many people; it confuses the heck out of HR on why a single hire needs 3 postings), posting ridiculously wide salary range or saying "salary commensurate with experience" (which nowadays says nothing at all). My 2c.
What the hell is wrong with posting a wide salary range and stating you are looking at all sorts of people then?
We're trying to prevent people wasting their time chatting to people when the remuneration will never be sufficient.
Because the second you post a wide salary range, people assume they are going to land on the mid-upper end of it no matter what the range is. If somebody lands on the lower end of it, they are going to feel slighted or insulted for just about all cases aside from new grads.
If I post a salary range of $50,000-$150,000 most people are going to look at it and decide that it probably pays $100,000-120,000. If somebody applies for that job and you offer them $60,000-70,000 they are going to be insulted just by the offer because of how much was left on the table (even if it's a perfectly good salary for the job).
Nobody wants to hear they are on the lower end of anything. That's why most people view themselves as "middle class".
If you post something that wide we're either looking at a sales position or at a company that does not differentiate between a Jr. and a Sr. Developer and lumps them all into Developer.
In itself it might be enough of a red flag not to work there.
Why can't a project just need developers? Maybe you need 2 or 3 across many skill ranges.
I think the best option is different posts with different salary ranges... but I do see how that can be a pain to copy paste data around (say 3 postings x 10 job sites = 30 copy pastes of the same data with a few different skills and a few different numbers)
If I came from a place that paid $50k, I'd expect them to be able to give me a small bump but likely land me in the low-to-mid part of the range and I'd apply. If I came from 75k I'd expect higher end of the range, and I'd apply. That could be unreasonable depending on how they place different tiers of engineer on that range, but if it is then it's better to split out the jobs by title (Software Eng Jr./Sr/Staff/Principal). If I came from over 100k I'll pass because I don't think they can afford me regardless of title.
Some of the reasons below are somewhat artificial constraints, but that's just our environment. I suspect they are not that infrequent either.
We cannot post three postings with intent to hire one person: Our group works on X. There is a group working on Y across the hall (and a bunch of others) and if we advertise three postings they will go to top management and HR and argue that one of our postings should be theirs.
Competition between groups on lab space, office space and good employees is friendly but extremely tough. Hiring someone who is a good fit and will likely work in our group for at least a few years is a huge benefit. Thus we would rather spend extra time trying to find a person who is smart, likes what we do and is genuinely interested in working on X, at whatever experience level, and snag him. This makes us open the "skills" window pretty wide.
Your internal open positions need not match your external open positions.
We all get that you really are saying "salary is dependent upon experience". The argument made above is simply that each of those ranges ought to be called out explicitly.
It sound weird to me that a company that has a role to fill will take anyone from "just graduated and can type" to "experienced tech lead". Doesn't sound like a role that is clearly thought out.
If you have stuff for a junior hire to do and stuff for a senior hire to do, and you end up hiring the junior hire, what happens to the "senior" work? Same question if you end up hiring the senior guy.
We work on applied R&D and the seniority boundaries are fuzzy. In practice if we take a junior engineer we can get a senior engineer or two off lab work (who in principle should not be spending any time in the lab, but does a little). If we hire a lead it frees folks doing high level concepts (and powerpoint) for more hands on stuff.
I tend to agree, but I think the argument against is basically that when you put a range, candidates' eyes go toward the high end and employers' eyes go toward the low end and then nobody ends up happy.
But if you don't provide a range, I also won't apply as a general rule (I'll make exceptions for the big tech companies, but they probably contacted me via a recruiter).
I don't want to waste my time going through the now pretty much standard long and grueling interview process for a company that's likely going to give me a lowball figure, which seems to be what 'competitive salary' really stands for on most of these job postings.
If I'm going to apply, I want to know there's at least a chance I'm not wasting my time.
I haven't applied for a job in over a decade but when I have a peruse of job listing websites in the US of A I'm always amazed when the only salary information is "extremely competitive" and "excellent benefits". I've heard people argue that a reputable company will pay market rates and that's all you need to know - but I totally disagree.
If I ever found myself back on the job market (unlikely, so perhaps I'll change my tune if it happened) I wouldn't ever apply for a job that didn't post a salary.
As the previous poster pointed out - in the UK the vast majority of jobs are posted with a salary. All the way up to C-level positions. I don't know about you, but the main reason I work is to get paid! So if a company isn't upfront about this primary benefit, I'm not going to engage with them.
That jobs are posted with a salary and what company is actually going to offer are different stories. There is a lot of time wasters around. A lot of companies use that as a bait and hope that once you go through lengthy interview process you will agree to a significantly lower offer from the advertised one and will make up bs reasons for that. One of the best I heard is that after completion of the interview process company said "our requirements changed in the meantime and we want to hire more developers that we initially needed, therefore we can offer x, so that we can fill all the positions", where x is significantly lower amount.
Honestly, companies should pay what the employee is worth, rather than employees agreeing to some artificial number the company pulled out of their ass. If you're a good fit for the role, you should be able to negotiate your salary. You shouldn't be rejecting a job because the salary is too low, you should be rejecting that job because they're looking for a junior programmer and you're a senior programmer.
I usually decline to interview people that ask my recruiter too early about salary. We work hard to post very clear job descriptions and requirements so if you read it and apply and get through the initial screening, then that's a pretty good indicator that we are in range on salary even if we've never discussed it.
Undoubtedly you're turning away the best candidates and almost exclusively interviewing candidates whom have extreme difficulty finding work elsewhere; so much so that the applicants value their own time so poorly that they believe it worthwhile to interview for a job which may not meet their personal financial requirements. I'd strongly suggest you change your practices and observe the improved calibre of interviewees.
EDIT: Also, if you really want good candidates, stop using a recruiter.
When ever I see a posting with out a range I figure they're just trying to hire someone they just aren't willing to pay for. They think they're going to wow someone with their great culture and/or the awesome technology their working on. Good luck on that.
Or get a person who trains up in your environment and then bails once they can prove to another employer that they have the skills and know they're underpaid. And god knows how much internal work/knowledge/skills they take with them.
I ask because most of the approaches that I get, or even when I approach (I'm actively looking) tend to fall short of where I've been in terms of income for the past several years. And culture, cool tech, and neat opportunities only count for so much. Until companies return to a cradle to the grave mentality (like IBM of old), then I'll reconsider.
Until then... I like technology and have some preferences, but for the most part, I'm a mercenary for hire, looking for the highest payout. There's some wiggle room for a cool company, working with cool people and dealing with cool technology, but more than a 20% cut in pay isn't something I'm likely to go for.
In the Phoenix area, a "Senior" or "Lead" developer can range from $40/hr or $75k/year on the low end to $80/hr or $150k/yr on the high end... I've been at the higher end, and have no intention of hitting the lower end. That's a very large gap for equivalent titles and job descriptions... so yeah, I ask.
Alternatively, if it was more like parts of Europe where I'm working 30-35 hour weeks, and getting a month and a half a year off, it might be different.
Why? Recruiters aren't shy about asking about pay expectations up-front and it lets you know if you're all on the same page before wasting everybody's time.
This is what we do on https://cleanwebjobs.com - no recruiters and salary always stated. However, you could keep it optional but promote jobs that list it above those that just say 'competitive' or 'market rate' (euphemisms for we want to pay you as little as we can get away with).
This approach has put off some potential employers but I think the benefits outweigh the downsides. It's like having an opt-in mailing list on user sign-up rather than an opt-out trick (un-tick this box). You get higher quality leads.
Whenever I've seen job ads mention a salary range, it's almost always been ridiculously low (huge red flag for an dysfunctional company trying to get something for nothing) or way too high (red flag that it's probably a recruiter trying to do a bait-and-switch).
All the Polish IT jobs groups I'm on (iOS dev + JS mostly) require a salary range. If nothing else, it's useful to see where we need to be while hiring.
Also, it's a legal requirement in Austria to post the salary.
Salary ranges on job listings benefit employers not employees.
Effectively; Salary is what the company values your contribution at. That's why when you hand your notice in you might be offered a pay rise.
By setting a public range you agree informally to be constrained by that range; asking for more once you've interviewed is harder.
Without salary range it is the opportunity that interests you. It lets you set expectations in the first (or later) conversation. Effectively giving you more power in the negotiation.
As an aside; always bid a tad high (for obvious reasons).
>Salary ranges on job listings benefit employers not employees.
I guess that's why most companies in the US don't list salaries, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Ranges on jobs benefit employees. It's simple negotiation. You want the other person to put out the first number. If the employer is thinking $100K for a position, but a qualified candidate starts with $80K, they just saved $20K a year. If they put $100K, they started first, so an employee who would have taken $80K now gets $100K.
As a side note, all IT people should watch Pawn Stars, American Pickers or any reality show that is part negotiation. It will give you a feel of small things to help negotiate. If all IT people learned to negotiate better, everyone's salaries would go up.
I've been on both sides of this, as employer and employee.
Salaries are arbitrary; it is what an employer values you as an employee, and what you value yourself at.
The best time to talk about salaries is when the company has offered you the role. Before then you have limited power. The reason companies set salary ranges is to frame the conversation on their terms.
> If they put $100K, they started first, so an employee who would have taken $80K now gets $100K.
This broadly assumes companies are not able to appropriately understand market salaries. I've never found this to be the case (certainly in large companies).
Large companies will have a salary range. But they will definitely also not want to publish them, for hopefully obvious reasons ("what do you mean my job title is on the market for $10K more??"). Its the same reason your contract probably says something about not revealing salary/renumeration.
I stand by my thesis; jobs with salary ranges I've always had more trouble negotiating. Where jobs without salary ranges I've found myself earning 10-15% more than peers. I'd argue the problem is that employees undervalue themselves and are risk averse in negotiating ("If I ask too much they will not hire me").
Ad blockers truly are the new virus scanners. They monitor everything that goes into and out of your computer and randomly break stuff just for kicks. And if that happens, it's somehow the fault of the software provider and not the ad blocker vendor.
You can't test against ad blockers (or virus scanners) because the lists keep changing, so you end up applying ridiculous alchemy like not calling your API endpoints "/analysis" but "/computation" and then you just hope for the best.
In the grand scheme of things, I agree that the people behind ad blockers are fighting the good fight, but in practice it's become a cat-and-mouse game of "who can break the internet the most". I don't know a solution.
This is a good reason to never prefix generated Javascript with hex hashes, at least without swapping out vowels. We rolled the dice one and had this happen on Wikispaces once; it was utterly infuriating to debug.
Nice catch, never thought about it. Is it more problematic with preffixes (vs. suffixes etc.) or should we generally avoid any random string? Appending a hash to the script is very convenient to force the download of the new version of an asset (but maybe we have better solutions now, haven't considered this issue in a while).
You can also do /js/myscript.js?v=1476929634 -- this generally works without any server-side changes. A CRC32 might work better, since controlling mtimes can be annoying.
Why is there a problem exactly? It seems even if hash contains "ad", uBlock origin is not blocking it. Does this problem exist for some specific ad blocking software?
We never understood why certain pull requests wouldn't load in Atlassian Stash/BitBucket Server - turns out our adblocker was blocking the page from loading due to having "ad" in the title.
I've run into that as well. I'm amazed that popular ad blockers still do that, since it's obviously trivial to work around for actual ads, and will result in so many false positives.
That's a hilarious comment, and a good point. But you can tell when your ad blocker is messing with site functionality beyond just blocking ads (i.e., the false positives your parent comment mentions). And at a certain point, this is a differentiator among the ad blockers.
+1 for the minimizing into one bundle thing. Sets of assets are loading sequentially which is slowing page load down.
Your code in each js file seems self-contained, so a simple in-order file concatenation into one .js file as a build step would help. gulp and gulp-concat would do it in a few lines of node, and you'd push the built output to your site.
If you end up wrting so much script that a concatenation approach stops scaling, look into webpack and web modules.
And that's one of the reasons I don't use an ad blocker. Not even uBlock Origin, which receives all the praise, is reliable in that sense.
I don't understand the crusade against people not using ad blockers by the way. I believe I have good reasons not to. Why do people seem to have a problem with that?
Here's the deal: Employers will exploit your age no matter how old you are. There is no "perfect age" for a developer. When you're young, they exploit you because you are inexperienced (especially at negotiation). When you are "old" they exploit by trying to play the age card. "Not a cultural fit"--LOL--fix your stupid culture and stop exploiting people, you smug fools!
So what is there? A ten year "ripe" age range where you're good enough to code but don't have a wife and kids? Blatant exploitation of human capital.
As far as "moving up to management" that's a load of crap. There aren't enough management positions to soak up all the age 35+ developers out there. It's an extremely narrow funnel. For the winners of that race, the prize is a lifetime of quiet suffering: You'll be lucky if you retire without major depression, anxiety, heart problems, or all three. I wonder what the mortality statistics are for people who work as IT managers?
There is also this role called "architect." Do not be enticed. It is, at best, a torturous role, and at worst, it's a redundant role that people who were only so-so at coding get promoted to so they can no longer annoy the rest of the team. The effectiveness of any given architect has an exponential decay from the instant they stop coding and start attending meetings all day.
Basically, you either keep coding and stay relevant or you go do something else completely. The rest is bs. But don't for a second imagine that companies aren't exploiting you by making you uneasy about your age or whatever else can be thrown in front of you to try and confuse, diminish, and lowball you.
From my personal experience, this is utter bullcrap. At my first real programming job in a somewhat large company, we were an Android team of 6 developers aged 20-25 (the 25 y.o. guy was the team leader) and one dude aged 40. It was very easy to get along with him, even though we couldn't really relate to the problems of having a teenage daughter. I wouldn't call these cultural differences problematic at all - actually having an older person's perspective on your team can be quite beneficial, young people are often too impulsive for their own good.
Most of us were juniors facing our first professional coding gig. The older guy's experience was invaluable because he already knew a bunch of languages, had used lots of different SDKs and had made a ton of mistakes, so we could and did learn a lot from him. The only thing that struck me as silly was that he was a 'Junior Developer' by job title since he also wasn't experienced in the concrete platform, even though he could code circles around us newbies.
I haven't ever worked in a 20-something only culture. I was the young guy when I joined my company, most of the team was in their 30s, some in their 40s. Over time it helped me grow as an individual, and it also helped me to grow professionally. Anyone who's had a few more years of experience probably has something wise to share with you, whether they know it or not. Hell even those with less experience often have a different perspective that is worth listening to. I guess what I'm trying to say is none of us should live in an echo chamber and we should all try to be open-minded (but maybe that's a little heavy-handed).
I've worked at three different small (<10 people) startups, every time with most employees 18-26 and one older at 35-48, all three times in three different roles. Never did it come up. Never did it ever cross my mind, nor seem to be a problem, to me or anyone, that this person was older than the rest of us. We got along great.
Age is only a cultural issue if you make it one. As it turns out, when you evaluate people on less superficial things than age, skin color or gender, this simply doesn't come up.
I've talked about this before and I've heard crazy shit like "what if the person in question has to go back to wife&kids rather than go out for drinks - it's a cultural misfit" and honestly... what the fuck. Not going out, not participating in out-of-office activities, who cares? I avoid most parties (or only go to show up) because I intensely dislike them. That doesn't make me older than the rest of my team, and if someone thinks it's an issue they're probably someone I don't want to work with.
There's extremes (such as extremely antisocial people) you can't always accomodate, but that usually has nothing to do with age.
I bet that usual 35+yr developer is a better developer than <25yr one. Company's task is to make money. Employee's task is to do the job and get paid for it. Where's "culture" here? Drinking beers, organizing parties, etc. is a waste of company's resources.
It can but there's some downsides. Not everyone likes drinking beers and parties with coworkers. For those people it does the opposite of improve morale.
The best way to improve morale is ample vacation time and good work-life balance.
That's something I learned while interviewing at tech companies. They all have tons of perks but when I talked with the employees 2/3 of the people I talked to (I actually counted) complained about work/life balance at some time. I would rather work a sane amount of hours a week and have more vacation than have a rock-climbing coffee bar at work or whatever the perks are now.
I think what the poster meant is that the twenty-somethings will just want to hack things up on the quick in Python or Rust while the old guy says whoa, let's sit down and write a specification first, and think about how we could architect this thing, and let's make OS packages out of all the components.
Sorry, I'm not clear on what you mean: they think that the old guy will write the specification and architect everything, or they think he will hack stuff together with them?
I guess that's probably correct. The old guy will appear to be slow because he'll want to think things through before digging his fingers into the keyboard, where the young guys are just fury of a tornado, but absolutely no plan.
And planning is 50% of the work.
However, I'm not being completely fair: my experience working in Silicon Valley with 20-somethings was extremely positive. At first, they were suspicious that it was taking me an entire day what they normally do in two hours, but they did it by manually hacking. What I was doing is writing a program which, based on data, generated another program to actually perform the work. I could just tell that they thought I was full of crap, because programs which program sounds completely esoteric.
What they didn't know was that the subject of programs which program, and data driven programming, is ancient history for old guys like me: open any European computer enthusiast magazine (64'er, Dator, anyone?) from the '80's and you're almost guaranteed to find at least one treatise on the subject in almost every issue, in one form or another.
But I digress; after that one day, their jaw dropped when I would perform the same amount of work that would take them two hours to an entire day... in three minutes. Every time.
Next they wanted to know how I did it. AWK and shell. Say what?!? What is AWK?
And this is where our story really begins: I always purposely kept enough free space at my desk, and an extra chair, so that anyone from all over the company could just pick up their laptop, walk over to me and plop themselves down next to me with whatever problem they were trying to solve. I also gave them homework. Pretty soon everyone was walking around with Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan's little Grey AWK book and used it as a reference. Then it was ANSI C 2nd edition's turn. Throughout it all, I kept teaching. There were whiteboard 1:1 classes on data structures. Then on algorithms. I loved it. And because this is regular work, I thought the exact theory that they needed to implement in order to solve the problem they were working on.
When it came time for some of the guys to switch jobs, go back to school, or go home, there were tears on both sides. I had had really devoted, bright young students, eager to learn, and I loved to teach; enthusiasm can be contagious given one is surrounded by right people. It was such a wonderful experience, and I think it was so for both sides.
I've had some pretty positive experiences working with older colleagues, so I'm totally in favor. I think the relationship can be better than either side alone because one tends to fill in the other's gaps.
Having been on both sides of the table, I can attest to it. When I was a young developer interviewing more experienced developers, I would foresee the hassle of arguing with him on everything day to day and that would instantly give negative weight to his candidacy. The irony is that I realized I had this subconscious bias only after I got older. On the other hand, when an older guy is getting interviewed by a potential peer, he should do everything in his power to appear coachable (gasp!) and flexible. The situation may be slightly different if you are being interviewed by a mid-level exec or a senior manager for a senior role in the team.
I don't know that there's anything quick about Rust. I'd probably be more inclined to use it for the second kind of project you're talking about than the first.
What sort of "culture" do you need in your workplace other than "get along with your co-workers, be respectful, and get your work done?" You are interviewing colleagues not drinking buddies.
I wish folks like Bray had championed this cause 20 years ago. It may not have done much, but... it feels a bit weird to hear old people complain about discriminatory impact. I can't say he was a contributing factor to the ongoing 'youth culture', but... it wasn't hard to see this coming.
My situation may be somewhat unique, in that I've had grey hair since I was 18. Not a HUGE amount at 18, but... people noticed. By the time I was in my mid 20s, it was definitely noticeable - more pepper than salt still, but noticeable. By 30... there's a fair amount of grey showing. Early 30s I've got people thinking I look good for being in my late 40s (had that more than a couple times).
But when it came to interviewing and opportunities, I was already feeling the age stigma in my late 20s. "Not a cultural fit" - not even in silicon valley mind you.
Had someone interviewing me - early 30s - said "well your resume only goes back about 12 years or so, what were you doing before that?" "High school". "Whoah..." - later found out he's assumed I was mid 40s.
Could I dye my hair? Yeah, but.. it's a pain, and... other parts of me will get old too. Not worth it - want to get hired based on ability, etc.
What's sad is to hear about the mid 30s folks wanting to get plastic surgery to look younger, which just validates and perpetuates the continuous youth culture. May not be possible to fight it at the Facebooks and Googles of the world, but it shouldn't be this bad...
Same here (30 now), and I'm dyeing my hair every month (1 day before going for a haircut, to be exact). I like looking younger myself, but I've also noticed a different perception from clients (I'm a freelancer). Got some grey showing in my full beard as well, and might dye it too once it bothers me. Dyeing takes about 45m in total, and is really good for a month if done around the time of haircuts. That's for short hair (2-7cm). I hate ordinary dye as it contains ammonia, but I found an ammonia-free foam application that works well. 45m and €8 per month is quite cheap to invest in (subjectively) better looks and improved confidence when talking to clients.
Isn't it the other way around when you are freelancing? I remember that people didn't really take me serious when I was around 25... Now that my first grey hairs are appearing (I'm 30) people start treating me like a grown-up.
I can't comment on Facebook but at Google I see plenty of people in their mid 30s and beyond. I joined in my early 40s. Yeah, we hire a lot of new grads / younger folks (I interview a lot of new grads) but I haven't noticed any overt ageism in the groups I've been in. Plus, the people making the hire decision don't see the candidate anyways. You should/would most likely get called out by the hiring groups if you added in color/vague "cultural fit" references.
Well, that's a huge company with many different types of engineers, and in business a long time (relatively). I would say the ageism is more likely at small startups that happen to have mostly young (in their 20s) engineers.
That's likely to be self-selecting, isn't it? I know as a 37 year old engineer with 2 kids I value stability and a reliable salary over excitement/'changing the world'/foosball tables etc.
I have the same hair "problem" (it runs in the family on my mother's side), I'm early 30s as well with significant gray hair showing and refusing to dye my hair, and... for me it has always been pretty much an advantage to get senior / management positions relatively fast since I was about 25 (I always tell anyone who asks/mocks about my hair that "at least they take me more seriously") and it has worked out pretty well so far.
My resume never goes back more than 5-7 yrs because it's not meant to be a history report but should be a strong 1-pager with just the highlights of your career, relative and relevant to the position you're applying for (for example, I started leaving out my education because it's not relevant to my experience anymore and it's not been a problem at all). I hope, for my own sake, that I don't owe everything to my hair, but it's definitely not been an obstacle to my progress.
I think confidence and attitude signal more than whatever you think people think about your hair (for starters, stop worrying/thinking about what other people may or may not perceive about you, simply project the self that you want to be) and if you worry about the gap in age perception so much, why not just put your birth date on your resume?
these experiences were mostly > 10 years ago, and since working for myself, it's largely a non-issue. I posted here not so much to complain/whine as much as to add (yet) another anecdote about ageism. Visual impressions do count on first meetings (well, all the time), and there's often little or nothing you can do about them (skin color, eye color, height, etc), and yes, a certain degree of "just get on with it and present yourself with confidence" is needed. There's also an issue about "if a hiring manager is that shallow, you may not want to work for that company anyway", but it's easier to take that mindset when you've got savings and prospects, vs having been out of work for a year and having trouble getting past a f2f interview (after having aced phone conversations) because of your hair color or age (not happened to me - yet? - but have had a couple friends go through this already just in late 40s).
I have the same problem. I have more grey than not at this point and I'm only a hair past 30. I've been thinking about dying it for interviews but the moment it washes out people are probably going to be put off by the charade regardless if it's right or wrong. Not to mention it signals insecurity. So I'd have to dye it and stick with it which sounds like a real pain in the ass.
Stories like this worry me. I'm in my early-mid 30's and the grey is starting to become noticeable. If I was to go on a job hunt I might get it colored.
I guess that's what happens when kids do enterprise: they think of office as an high school party, not as a place to get things done and cultivate a product.
I thought I was on medium.com.. You need to add a call to action to the end of your post! Add a short line - "if you've experienced ageism checkout these job listsing at /link" or "to see what I built visit /link" or something similar. Lots of lazy people want to click a link at the end of your post to see your site rather than trying to find a link in your profile or scrolling all the way to the top. Plus when someone inevitably copies your content, you get a free link.
I should make a site with marketing tips for devs...
I thought I was hot shit when I had 5 years under my belt, too, just like those whipper snappers. Took another 10 to recognize how full of shit that idea was.
I think there's a certain niche that wants to hire experienced, disciplined and reliable "old" geeks like you (or actual old guys like me...still grinding code at 50). Looks like you're going to own it. Well played.
Totally agree, thought I was a solid engineer in my early-mid 20s. Had no idea how much I'd learn. I'm frightened by how much more I could learn now (42).
I waste much less time, still make silly mistakes, but much less often.
Less is more, focus on results, not code. Two things off the top of my head.
I just hired onto a subsidiary of a big corp, a cadre of 5 of started on the same day: 39, 41, 42, 45, and 55. Companies are paying top dollar for experience now, from what I'm seeing.
It sounds like everything worked out perfectly for the author on that fateful day. What are the odds that a stranger saw the author's initial (unsuccessful) post in the HN 'new' section and decided to write a whole article about it, post it to HN (with a link to the original form) and that this new post made it to the front page... Then it crashed... But thankfully there was an HN moderator on that day who cared enough to edit the link to send users directly to this form.
It sounds like the author made the most of it though, so I guess it's well deserved.
Woah - did I miss the announcement that old is now 35 and above? Given the working range of professional engineers in the SF field, it sad that its not easier to invert the problem and build a Young-Fun-and-Full-of-Recent-Academic-Course-Material-Jobs.com.
No you didn't. It's just that SV only wants to hire people they can make work 80+ hrs. per week (preferably) and who will refer to it as "paying their dues" and be "thankful to get the experience under their belts."
"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects certain applicants and employees 40 years of age and older from discrimination on the basis of age in hiring, promotion, discharge, compensation, or terms, conditions or privileges of employment." [0]
OldGeekJobs.com works since it's the reverse of this... essentially discriminating against younger candidates. It's not legal to discriminate against 40+ in the US.
It reverses it by discriminating against the young, fighting ageism with ageism. I didn't realise age discrimination against those younger that 40 was legal in the US. There are other countries where a "jobs for the old" site would most likely be illegal.
Except it's not jobs just for people who are older, it's companies explicitly saying they do not discriminate based on age. No one is saying they'll only hire someone 40+, unless they're looking for 20+ years experience which implies your age.
I don't think that age is old, I find I rather have people who are experienced more important than age. If you have skill, I could care less if you're 80, so long as you get results and share your insights. I've learned plenty from those who are developers for longer amounts of time than me.
A real issue is targeting jobs for people who don't live in places that are known tech hubs. It took me knowing the right person to finally get a 'real job' in the field, and I only got it a few months ago (less than 2) I honestly don't know what I could of done otherwise, I've applied at a number of places and only ever got maybe one email back.
This is just how recruiting works in tech, it's nothing about you personally. Knowing people is really the best way to get work in this industry even in the hubs.
This is why code schools are so successful, unlike a traditional educational institute they are usually run by people who have worked in the industry, who will have the contacts to get you your first job.
One of the reasons I want to work on OldGeekJobs is because I’ve experienced ageism first-hand. I’m only 37 years old, but I was rejected by a startup of twenty somethings a few months back.
Ahh - that first painful moment of, "Wait a second, I'm too young to be the victim of age discrimination!"
I hadn't seen this site before, and I think it's a great idea. Though I'm young, I am certainly terrified about the trend of age discrimination in the valley - after all, we all age! I'm glad to folks trying to make a meaningful difference in the trend. Perhaps through good samaritans such as OP, those same twenty-somethings that reject so many qualified applicants on account of age will receive better treatment when they themselves reach 35 or 40.
In 5 years there will be some new hot nodejs and then those current 20 year old will find the same thing and they will complain about the same thing. Oracle and Sap job pay pretty well and they are filled with old people (30+).
spent an hour putting up a Google form and static site on a cheap Digital Ocean instance.
Now I feel like the Old Geek (I'm 32):
What's the deal with Digital Ocean? If the website is static and receives content by manual copy-pasting from a Google sheet (as outlined in the article), why bother with Droplets and Storage and all the other configuration? Why is good old web hosting (the kind where you just upload your html/php/js via FTP and it all just works) not good enough for this? Really curious.
Digital Ocean is just a simple VPS provider - I wouldn't even call it cloud.
The usual cPanel PHP 5.4 shared hosting is consistently unreliable, insecure and a generally overall bad idea. Who would you actually even trust to run it?
Your qualifier there made me laugh so hard because it's so true for all kinds of sysadmin-y reasons. Flashbacks of talking down a VP who said "just put it on DO or something" came to mind immediately.
Not sure I follow that ontology as that doesn't necessarily make something a cloud. API's to interact with the ecosystem make it more like a cloud.
Whilst I understand DO have API's, just saying the machine can be dynamically resized doesn't justify the cloud tag. Cloud doesn't need to be virtual, either.
To me, I think of cloud as a business term that describes infrastructure that can be easily manipulated with software (or dashboards). That's what DO provides albeit with WAY less functionality than AWS (but at a much lower price point).
Well I'm 40 year old and understand that you question why use a DO instance for a static site. But I would think why not put it AWS s3 or GH-pages. Nothing special needed and they serve static pages for you.
Good old web hosting is not good at all. Please please never ever use shared web hosting for anything. As soon as your site gets a little bit popular you're almost guaranteed it's gonna get hacked.
DO is VPS, so there's not the slightest chance for tenants in the same machine to see or modify stuff from other tenants (besides attacks through the network); also you have a guarantee on the amount of CPU and memory allotted to you. The best kind of shared hosting only relies on unix user permissions for security and that's not enough, plus you don't get the CPU and memory guarantees VPS offers.
I actually had a DO instance hacked, via Wordpress exploit. I guess I wasn't keeping my Wordpress up to date, or not running a security plugin I didn't know I needed. Had to shut the whole thing down, start up a new droplet, reload the website from backup.
Meanwhile my WP sites on DreamHost are happily humming along, automatically upgraded, any problems are promptly attended to by their support team. $12/month, unlimited sites/storage/bandwidth. I do not work for DreamHost.
DO is a simple hosting if you want. It is more or less the same way.
You create a droplet with one click with either apache or nginx and you're good to go. Sftp probably, If you feel nostalgic you can have ftp access too.
I would understand if the author was writing about setting up the blog with angular and using Amazon fg6 instance with cloudfire load balancer...
I'm not even the target market (too young), and this is my favorite job board already. Very fast to navigate around - speed IS a feature! Also love how granular the locations are.
I really like how the author posted the fake pricetag before spending time implementing payment processing - easy way to verify people will pay for it, low cost of experimentation. I've heard of other companies using similar strategies like a/b testing features that don't exist yet to figure out what they should build next.
I started a new career as a front-end developer at the age of 33(last year), so I have my age and lack of experience counting against me. I must say, I do worry about my future prospects a lot.
Hopefully sites like this can throw a bone to us old dogs out there.
Thanks for sharing this. If not finest then quickest example of idea -> MVP -> Product I have seen so far. I applaud you for the brave decision of putting it out there.
On the contrary, I always end up planning endlessly. Evaluating the best framework, best UI, best architecture and actually end of doing nothing.
What's the purpose of backfilling jobs from StackOverflow -- is it just to make the site look less like a ghost town? Aren't those not necessarily old-geek friendly jobs?
Awesome story! Just as a heads up with uBlock Origin in Chrome on macOS one is greeted with a header followed by a white page. Everything loaded with once I shut it off.
Congrats for doing this and writing so honestly about it! But why only $1000? There are 134 "green" jobs * $50 which would be $6700. Or the Stripe integration was added that much later on?
I have a team of male devs, and for my last hire really wanted a female for a different perspective and help balance the team, however only received 1 not ideal female application.
At the end of the day, oldgeeks mean you are discriminating (filtering out the young), why should it not work on gender also? Its all just different levels of discrimination.
Now that I think about it, I've seen a bunch of complaints on HN about Amazon having fake goods for sale (most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316, but it comes up pretty much every time there's an article remotely related to Amazon). Maybe I should mention something about how we're only sourcing from legitimate suppliers like retailers or direct from manufacturers, which might alleviate that issue. It's definitely not the main problem I'm trying to solve, which is the amount of time good deal-hunting takes. (Price comparison, coupons, taxes, plus around a dozen other considerations).
I think it would be useful to give examples on how or where you your site finds an item at a price that I, presumably, was not able to find?
It sounds sketchy. :)
Also not sure if the whole workflow of your clients providing prices for items and then hoping your site delivers will work. How do I know the price I provided is realistic at all?
If you already have the capability to find items cheaply, just list those items on your website and let people purchase them :)
>I think it would be useful to give examples on how or where you your site finds an item at a price that I, presumably, was not able to find?
Right now I'd be checking other retailers, other price comparison sites, some tools, plus using a handful of tricks to save off the posted price. It's deal-finding-as-a-service.
I want the flexibility to be able to source differently later; e.g. if there's a lot of demand for one brand I might get direct from the manufacturer, or wholesale, etc. You as the customer should be agnostic as to where I get the product from, as long as it's the right price.
>Also not sure if the whole workflow of your clients providing prices for items and then hoping your site delivers will work. How do I know the price I provided is realistic at all?
I don't know either. I believe I'll be able to fulfill a significant portion of orders, but I won't know that until a bunch of orders come in.
If you a put in a price within a few percent of retail, there's a good chance we'll be able to meet it.
Also, I'm not charging tax out of NY, and most states have a dropship sales tax loophole. That means you could save 3-4% off the Amazon+tax price on most items even if I don't find a deal.
>If you already have the capability to find items cheaply, just list those items on your website and let people purchase them :)
Well, I've sold through Amazon and other channels and have had over 100k in sales, all from being able to find items cheap enough to resell. But to launch a website to sell you either need a narrow niche (which prevents mass appeal), or a huge investment to list many products (or big partnerships with sellers with lots of products). Allowing the customer to name the product lets me not worry about product pages, and I do think the Name Your Own Price mechanism is beneficial to all parties (priceline is valued at $73 billion because they brought a ton of value to users).
Eventually I'm going to want to open up to sellers/retailers, but even without that I think I can add value.
I just joined a new company and I feel a little reverse-ageism from my part. My team and most of the company employees are at a younger point in their life. After leaving a company where I could talk to people about kids the same age as mine and such, I find it all a little unnerving and uncomfortable. They've been fine and I imagine once I've been there awhile it will be ok, as I still have people outside of work to talk to, but it will take a little getting used to.
Also - When I search for 'c#' it seems to filter out the '#'.
Awesome.. I remember reading your first post and finding the idea neat but also saying in my head, with amusement: "right, everything is easy when your name is John Wheeler".
I wonder if the problem is specific to ageism in individual contributor roles. I've worked at a few startups where maybe 1/3 of the product team was over 40, but I can only think of two coworkers over 40 who didn't have any direct reports. Do we find ourselves wondering why an individual hasn't "advanced" to a management position after 10+ years?
I don't ever wonder this when hiring. It's very common to see someone who tried management for a while and didn't like it or wasn't good at it, and have concluded that they love coding for a living.
Technical management isn't for everyone, and isn't a natural progression from being a software engineer. The transition is very difficult for most people.
Job postings aren't sorted by date correctly. For example https://oldgeekjobs.com/jobs/California?page=2 shows jobs posted '2 days ago' while the front page shows jobs posted '30 days ago'.
I was going to make a snarky comment regarding if this site is for old geeks, then the blog should have an RSS feed, but if you go from the article to the blog's home page the RSS feed is there. :-)
Are you planning to open this up for areas outside the USA? (Australia here.)
What I really like about this is how the interface is so dead simple. It could be the Craigslist of job postings with the $50 barrier to entry to filter out shitty posts. My advice is to not overdo it with features and KISS.
Congratulations on seeing the opportunity and quickly moving to do something about it. It is unique enough at first sight that you got early coverage in the press, which is very helpful.
Quick question: I did not see anything unique to "old geek" in the website, other than the URL of course. I guess it is an implicit assumption by both job seekers as well as job posters.
On that note, where would this concept be headed if other job sites added a simple attribute called age (or something similar but more palatable) where job posters could specify their preferred age range, and job seekers could search on it?
Great site! And thanks for taking my feedback in stride about the "tell people you heard it on oldgeekjobs.com" not being appropriate for the scraped jobs! The change (along with prioritizing paid ones) looks great!
Sir, a fine website, one that I cannot take advantage of because I am in Australia. However a minor point - I do have some difficulty seeing the pale green highlight around the positions, I believe it may be to do with my red/green colourblindness, common amongst men, it is almost impossible to see against the bold blue. If you are feeling creative maybe you can change the colour of the highlight to a different less pale green or another colour. Thanks again for your site and congrats on your success. Cheers.
On one hand, I'm getting older. On the other, my skills are getting better. The younger people I work with can't keep pace with me. And, my employers aren't unaware of the fact that it indeed is a zero-sum game, so my age (early 40ies) has never been an issue so far. I believe there're and will be many employers who look at nothing but what you bring to the table. As a businessman, you wouldn't be foolish enough to hire only noobs.
Idea to make even more money (if you get billionaire on it, please make me a millionaire also :) ): there are services that post jobs to multiple job boards. Create an API they could hook your site in easily and offer them a 20$ discount, so they can offer your service to their customers for 40$ and can also win a 10$/job posted to you.
Examples of such sites that come to mind are ziprecruiter.com and broadbean.com
That early "Hacker News Effect" really got you off to a roll, and you made the most of it. Have you ever thought what would have happened if that Wordpress write-up was not created, or didn't get such a good response on HN?
Love the concept and the site. Minor gripe though, that I also find in most job boards: searching for Scala also gets me all the entries with the word "scalable" in them :-(
Don't quote me: seems from the context he just threw it on there to see if they would still use it. Which they did. So he actually setup stripe to accept money. That's what I inferred anyway.
Why should this site owner cater to someone using adblock software?
Because he's trying to make money and ignoring this problem may lose him users? It's not like he's actually showing regular web ads, so an ad-blocking user is as potentially profitable as any other.
If there's an insistance on a fixed-width font for the site, I really wish it was something more like Consolas/Inconsolata etc... The job descriptions are nearly unreadable on my display, lighter gray, with a relatively thin font weight.
Thanks, I know it came across fairly snarky, and that wasn't my intent, it's just I had a lot of trouble actually reading the site. For reference, here's the fixed width family bootstrap is using...
It's the norm in the UK and we successfully forced this in Poland (though posters almost NEVER post salaries here). How? The companies need IT staff so much that almost all IT job boards (at least the most popular ones - like FB groups or https://nofluffjobs.com) started requiring the salary range.
I think your idea is praiseworthy, but I'd never ever create a website like this with hidden salaries. Especially in your case - it's so cool people post jobs on your board, but what if they do so, because they're offering 10, 20, 40% less because it's a place for "old geeks that noone wants"?
I'm really super proud that if a IT ad in Poland has no salary range most of us just ignore it. And it took us maybe 2 years to get to this place. I think every other country should follow the lead and end the "competitive salary" trend. I don't want to spend 3 days on interviews just to discover that the salary offered is way too low for me. Salary missing from an ad is a big lack of respect, the sooner people realize that the better.