> The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us.
I wonder how much this used to apply to the Valley as a whole.
> The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us.
As an older dev, who isn’t a “cultural fit,” I can vouch for this. It ended up becoming my bane.
It forced me into an early retirement (I never made the huge gobs of money that people seem to make, these days, but I lived frugally, and invested fairly well).
The end result, for me, is that I am now happier than I have ever been in my life. I’m architecting and constructing software that shames anything I ever worked on, as a younger dev. I’m exploring software development practices that my employers never let me do (and that are working well).
I’m not making any money at it, but I’ve never actually done this stuff for the money.
“other people like us” has changed, over the years. Folks like me, are now an anachronism.
Of course, the thing about grey hair and cultural awkwardness, is that it comes with decades of experience in shipping software. That’s not something that comes in a Cracker Jack box (an example of said “cultural awkwardness”).
I wouldn’t have had the guts to make this move, on my own. I had to be forced into it.
So, it sucked, and was humiliating and scary, but, in the aggregate, things have turned out OK.
I’ve done a bunch of stuff. My strengths are device control and UX widgets, but I’m working on an aggregate system that is social-media-ish (for a specific demographic). Not actually the stuff I shine at, but I like challenges. It’s coming along nicely.
It is allowing me to play with UX, and that’s something I enjoy.
Probably quite a bit. Pre-dotcom, Valley salaries mostly didn't scale with higher cost of living. (There are still CoL issues of course, but not as much at the mid/senior FAANG level.) It's one reason I never moved there from the East Coast.
As an older dev, who isn’t a “cultural fit,” I can vouch for this. It ended up becoming my bane.
It forced me into an early retirement (I never made the huge gobs of money that people seem to make, these days, but I lived frugally, and invested fairly well).
The end result, for me, is that I am now happier than I have ever been in my life. I’m architecting and constructing software that shames anything I ever worked on, as a younger dev. I’m exploring software development practices that my employers never let me do (and that are working well).
I’m not making any money at it, but I’ve never actually done this stuff for the money.
“other people like us” has changed, over the years. Folks like me, are now an anachronism.
Of course, the thing about grey hair and cultural awkwardness, is that it comes with decades of experience in shipping software. That’s not something that comes in a Cracker Jack box (an example of said “cultural awkwardness”).
I wouldn’t have had the guts to make this move, on my own. I had to be forced into it.
So, it sucked, and was humiliating and scary, but, in the aggregate, things have turned out OK.