[tuyguntn]

Yes, when 50 years old applies as a senior engineer, 25 years old senior engineers get uncomfortable. You might not notice it in any public conversation, but there is still a resistance:

   * will they be on-call?
   * can they work long hours?
   * how do I delegate to them?
   * are they going to resist new tech?

[adamredwoods]

Recently, I've had a co-worker be "okay" with alerts in the middle of the night. I refused because I have to drive my child to school at 7.30am.

[paxys]

This is really the crux of it. Companies want to hire young engineers without responsibilities so they can burn them out. And there's a long line of new grads who will happily fit into that culture.

[sameoldhn]

do school buses not exist anymore? what in the world?

[carlosjobim]

If your kids school is more important than your job is, that only means your job is extremely unimportant. Like my job.

Your kid is better off not going to school for a day, or arriving late. They're not doing anything important in school.

Depending on company, maybe they need to hire people to do important things and have responsibility for important things. Somebody who would prioritize things like driving their kids to school over that is a no-hire. They should work a job which is less important, like I myself do.

[abeppu]

I think one seriously broken thing is that every company seems convinced their work is important, and scales their sense of how important work items are relative to the company as a whole. Orgs and teams do the same.

You can be on a team that runs a service that's a small part of the overall company product offering, which may be a convenience rather than mission-critical to its clients, who themselves may be doing something BS, and that team may still want you to wake up at 3AM when something alerts. Making a blanket statement that just because a job wants you to wake up at 3AM means it must be important (nevermind more important than family responsibility) places way too much trust in the judgement of employers.

[carlosjobim]

All of us here have been to school and know how utterly unimportant it is. If not, that is a serious case of amnesia. It's a storage unit for kids, guarded by the most dim-witted people from the community. So when somebody says they can't work because of their kid's school, then either that person does not care about their job, or the company is asking for something out of line. It's either of those two options, depending on what actually is the job.

My job is unimportant, so I can leave the phone off at night. If I had an important job, then the case would be different.

[OutOfHere]

> All of us here have been to school and know how utterly unimportant it is.

I think the same can be said for companies. All of us here worked at companies and know how utterly unimportant most of them, or at least most of their projects, are.

> If I had an important job

They don't exist for the most part, at least 90% of them in our line of work aren't.

[jaennaet]

"I didn't learn anything in school, therefore nobody learns anything in school. Q.E.D."

[adamredwoods]

I'm sorry you think this way. The entire human foundation is based upon passed knowledge by means of reading and writing. I feel it's essential. Schooling is one way to do this, and also a means of learning and practicing social skills.

As far as being on-call goes, there are many different ways to be a part of support without a brute-force approach. For example, create a more robust QA process. Another is to create actionable alerts. There are many ways workers can work peacefully and meet director goals.

[carlosjobim]

Missing one day of school in your life because your mother or father had something very important to take care of will not have any impact on your education. And the people who pretend that this is the case are just the kind of dishonest people that you don't want to hire. Hackers can down vote me as much as they please, that's not going to change how businesses think about hiring.

And now we're reaching the core of the "ageism" discussion. Every person will have some things that they consider more important than work; their health for example. But as people get older, the more things get added to that list, because they are more established in life. But do you want to hire a person which considers everything more important than their job? Something which businesses value highly is when people are reliable. If the boss can rely on that a certain employee can be counted on to take care of things, that means that the boss can also work to 100% of his potential where they are needed.

A good run company will make sure to hire enough people, or in other ways make sure that emergency situations don't become something frequent. But we can never get away from the fact that the earth spins around the sun, meaning everything in the economy experiences the ebb and flow of seasonal demand. Even Hank Hill has to take care of propane emergencies at times.

>As far as being on-call goes, there are many different ways to be a part of support without a brute-force approach. For example, create a more robust QA process. Another is to create actionable alerts. There are many ways workers can work peacefully and meet director goals.

I completely agree with this.

[tuyguntn]

> Your kid is better off not going to school for a day, or arriving late. They're not doing anything important in school.

Not sure, if you are serious.

Maybe we should become slaves of corporations? Should we divorce maybe with our partners because sometimes we go dining and on-call is more important than me having a dinner with my partner?

[carlosjobim]

Don't you remember school?

> Maybe we should become slaves of corporations?

That's why school exists in the first place, because parents are stuck at their jobs and new corporate/government slaves and cannon fodder have to be indoctrinated.

[OutOfHere]

A corporation that wakes you up at 3 am is dysfunctional by definition. It exists only to waste investor funds and burn people out while producing nothing of lasting value. There is no reason why it should be actively allowed to harm one's health too.

[carlosjobim]

Expand your perspective. Things happen at 3AM in the real world. A tree falls over a power line in a storm, etc.

[jltsiren]

Isn't it usually the other way around? The less important you are to the company, the more rigid your hours are. If you actually matter to the company, you probably get flexible hours and the ability to take leave on a short notice, as they stand to lose more if you quit.

[mindtricks]

This is basically ageism. It's not accurate and should be coached out. Flip the question for a 25 year old:

* Will they be on on-call or out partying with their friends? * Are they committed to the work or will they hop to another company once trained? * Are they able to work within our codebase or just jump to the next hot thing?

These types of questions are ridiculous for both sides.

[tuyguntn]

> should be coached out

No, it won't work. Biologically, 25 years old without a family responsibilities will not get it anyway.

If you are 25 years old, single and your friends are similar to you, what would you do? Most I know are working 12-14 hour/day, because they eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work.

[disgruntledphd2]

Worth noting that this basically doesn't work long term, and is much easier to maintain if it's different work (a job and a new enterprise).

You'll notice that you become less efficient over time. I recommend taking a long weekend and coming back and keeping to 8 hours. It's a great discipline if you want to go further in your career.

[mixmastamyk]

As the fifties version of myself, I won’t need to be on-call or work long hours because I did it right the first time.

Reply to below:

Of course. But if you plan ahead properly, it will be extremely rare. To the point where it isn’t economical to have people on call. Because the downtime was caused by a meteor or maybe AWS.

If it is truly mission critical, have a night shift.

[tuyguntn]

> I did it right the first time.

Maybe you are writing libraries/frameworks?

Any service running on production can fail anytime, whether you did everything right or not, things break sometimes.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

How much experience does it take to be "senior" in that case? Has the 25 y-o engineer been working for 10 years or are they just diluting the "senior" term?

[Nextgrid]

From my experience the "senior" term has been significantly diluted in the zero-interest-rate period.

[disgruntledphd2]

Yeah people started calling me senior when I had 3 years of data experience so I totally agree.