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I'm not that inclined to interview for certain positions because of my age. For instance, I had an internal Facebook recruiter try, pretty aggressively, to get me to interview for a devops position a couple of years ago. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with him, over a couple of sessions, but in the end I declined even an initial interview. There were a number of reasons: 1) I'm not a devops guy. I've done what amounted to devops in the past as a matter of wearing many hats, but I don't think I've ever done devops well, and I don't think I know how to. 2) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, one that had clients like Google (though not Facebook,) and there is no chance that Facebook would have offered me as much as I was making at the time. 3) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, and, while dealing with clients, employees, contracts, etc. was stressful, and not something I particularly enjoyed, I did kind of like being the boss. Have you ever thought a bit of code was just bad, and wanted to tell someone to re-write it, but refrained from doing so because... reasons? You still have to take people's feelings into account when you're the boss, but you can sit down, pair with them, and eventually hammer out something you're both happy with, but that you have final say over (as an aside, I'd strongly recommend pairing as a method of conflict resolution- sometimes you're very wrong about what you're insisting on, and pairing tells you that, and why.) 4) I wasn't done with my work. I was working on a project that I cared a great deal about, inventing novel algorithms that solved long-standing problems in computer science, and I wasn't finished doing so. and, wait for it... 5) According to Zuckerberg: "Young people are just smarter." OK, lets be fair: he also said "I don't know...young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family." I do not have a car (I really ought to get one, but they are such a pain in the ass,) and I do not have a family (I think it might be a bit late for me to get one of those,) but I'm inclined to think that I know things about solving problems hard enough that they take years to crack by virtue of having spent years cracking hard problems. I'm also inclined to think that that distinguishes me from even very smart young programmers. The truth is that I think even doing devops for Facebook would be an interesting proposition. I imagine there are hard problems to crack there. If there's one thing I really regret about my career, it is that I've almost always been on top, and I have never had the opportunity to learn from people better than me. But I am not very interested in working for Facebook, because I think the culture there is not welcoming to people my age, and their recruiting was very scattershot. If I really wanted to move to a big company I'd look at Akamai first. They also recruited me kind of heavily a while back, but they had spent the time to understand who I was, and were recruiting for a serious R+D position in Cambridge, working with other greybeards. |
Well, I come from the future, just fresh off my time machine, and according to Zuckerberg in 2032, "Old people just know more stuff".