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Salaries For Workers in Technology Roles, Including Software Engineers and Product Managers, Peak Around Age 45 (hired.com)
A report released on Thursday by the job marketplace Hired reveals that salaries for workers in technology roles, including software engineers, product managers, and data analysts, peak around age 45. After that, earnings level off or drop until retirement. According to the report, the average salary of US technology workers is about $135,000, with the highest pay in the San Francisco area.
San Francisco pay more but in other areas half the average salary is good in SF it's shit
Damn, I need a raise.
Vancouver Canada, almost as expensive as SF.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
On the other hand, my benefits are way better than most of my IT friends working in the private sector, and the "feel" is different. For me, anyway, this is the best fit.
#DeleteChrome
While it quite possible to have your salary bump 10% per year on average in your late 20's / early 30's, it's not like that could continue forever. Once you reach a Senior Architect / Manager / Director / VP role by your 40's there isn't much room to grow for most people. Sure a select few will become executives or successful entrepreneurs, but that is not possible for everyone.
Having your salary peak at around $150k and then only keep up with inflation isn't that bad of a thing. Plenty of professions are worse off (actually nearly all professions).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
In my case, 45 was the age I developed old man smell...maybe if I used cologne I would still be employed.
These studies always make me wonder whether they are taking into account that techies graduate into management and other higher paying jobs. It may be that the higher earners are getting sorted out of the studies by that age.
To live like here I need $400K San Fransisco money. Cheetah no like northern California. Stoners want sex with Cheetah. And Jane turn lesbian in SF. She no like Tarzan no more.
If I did that level at 30, that’s good?
That's pretty good pay for somebody who doesn't seem to understand the concept of averages!
This is a great point and Ill clarify.
Tech salaries in San Francisco and Seattle are high but the cost of living is so high that even making 400K (which I do between salary+stock+wife income) that you are house poor (average house in decent school area 1.5-2M due to farcically low interest rates/money printing) or pay $5000+ in rent just to exist - thats 60K just to exist. And taxes here with AMT are around 50%, so 400K -> 200K (California charges more than 9% income and sales tax). 200K - 60K means 11K / mo. Now childcare, private schools, cost of living, etc. You would be shocked how just food, fuel, child costs, etc, all rack up here. Its insanity how fast 11K/mo turns into dust and at the end of the day you either have millions of debt in mortgage or are facing crushing rents.
It would make sense to make 200K anywhere else and live like a relative king.
The biggest sadness about San Francisco / bay area is the children of tech people are lost. Latchkey, parent-less, druggies, no very smart and no hope. Cost of living is hopeless for them and competition with all the H1B etc for them will be them vs the rest of the world. So extreme cost of living and horrific competition from the entire world.
So Joe_Dragon is right. Salaries are high here. Cost of living is crushing along with abusive confiscatory taxation and the tech companies are ALWAYS trying to flood the market with H1B and scabs to lower your "rate"
Rising health care costs and a desire on corporations to avoid training workers (it costs money and corporations fear they'll leave) drive many IT workers from the field at about age 50.
It spiked up after the supreme court gutted age discrimination protection in 2009.
Likewise, younger workers have open said on slashdot that older workers "don't fit their culture".
Which would be amazingly blunt if they said, "black workers don't fit our culture" or "female workers don't fit our culture".
Google actually approached the same 41 year old female engineer 4 times because their automated software was selecting her was a highly qualified candidate and younger human managers repeatedly rejected her. I'm not sure how her lawsuit turned out. So 41 is too old for some managers at Google.
Thing is .. everyone gets older every day. And I've known 64 year old java programmers who programmed the pants off younger workers with a few years experience.
The best thing you can do is to save hard and take any training opportunities you can get. Then also self train in what little spare time you have after the historically longer than average IT work weeks. Eventually, unless you are lucky, all the training in the world won't help because some young managers won't care about your skill set and simply say you are "too old". That's when you retire early on your savings.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Unless you were lucky and smart enough to end up at Google, FB, Amazon, etc right out of high school, you definitely need to leave at least every 3 years in order to achieve maximum income by the time you are 45. I only have two years left, so I should really hurry up :)
I'm behind the trend. Mine peaked when I retired at 55.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
vs statistical inflation. I find the cost of things I actually buy (food, shelter, transportation, my kid's college) goes up about 3.25-3.5% a year. The cost of things I don't really buy (vacations, electronics, cars in the $30k+ range, etc) go up 1.5-2.5%. There's a 'net' of about 2%. But I don't see that 2%, I see the 3.25-3.5%. Meanwhile my wages go up 2.5% a year if I'm very, very lucky. Most years it's 1.5-2%. And I'm doing better than most. Lots of folks I know haven't had a raise in years. For them the only way to get a raise is to get a new job.
I saw a story about a woman who started at K-Mart in 1974 making $3/hour. When the store closed this year and she was laid off she made $10.50/hr. Thing is, $3 in 1974 was just shy of $16/hr today. She'd lost 1/3 of her pay in 44 years. Us tech workers don't have it as bad, but we're still feeling it. Everybody's losing ground. You just kind of hope you make it until your kid's are on their own and that you die before the layoffs in your 60s come.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I think there's a bunch of factors at work.
- People working in Seattle, and SF/SV make tons of money because of that region's out-of-control housing market and other cost of living factors.
- If this is recent data, don't forget that this is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Large Seattle/SF/SV employers heavily favor younger workers and hip startup types. So, on average the age of people reporting high salaries will be lower, while their salaries will be comparatively higher. Microsoft and Amazon are throwing money at people who can spell DevOps and cloud, and the insane development cadence ensures that workers are younger. If you can handle "Seattle Hundreds" year in and year out, and save your money, you will make out until the bubble pops.
- The reality is that there is an upper limit to tech salaries no matter where you go. You have to be exceptional to get executive-level pay in places with normal cost of living. This either means you've invented something for the company, are literally holding the entire org together yourself, or are a consultant traveling 11 months out of the year deploying the newest hotness.
Now that I'm starting to hit that magic number (I'll be 45 in 2 years) this is starting to make sense. There is a constant downward pressure on wages and you have to stay relevant if you want to stay near the top. I like where I am in my career...I'm paid to keep up at a reasonable pace and enjoy being able to pass on wisdom to the new grads as they filter in. But no one should expect that they'll get beyond that cap, whatever it is for their specialty, unless they're willing to consult or hop jobs every six months for increases before the next recession hits.
The biggest sadness about San Francisco / bay area is the children of tech people are lost.
The Bay Area is a great place for a kid to skateboard and smoke pot.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You are terrible at budgeting. Even if your rent is $5k you have 140k clear according to your own numbers and you feel hurt? Get over yourself and learn to manage your finances.
You cannot conclude by looking at current salaries vs. age that the average person younger than the peak will peak at that point! The comparison across age is an apples and oranges one. The salary environment at the time you entered engineering has a long-term effect on your salary progress.
With that in mind, it is possible that the peak indicates older engineers took a bigger hit in 2009 and that starting salaries and early career raises have been growing faster than the salaries of experienced engineers in the post-2009 recovery due to rampant age and experience discrimination in the industry. This would result in a peak that is moving up in age (recovering to the normal early-50s range) though likely not at a year for year rate.
In other words, that peak might be 46 in two more years and 47 in four as the younger beneficiaries of the salary increases age.
Some large corporations experience this as a matter of policy because they limit max pay raises of employees to 1.5x the average pay raise but have to pay the market price for new engineers. This creates a situation where it is not unheard of for an employee to receive maximum raises for years and be responsible for managing new hires who make almost as much or more than they do because the market rate has been increasing by more than 1.5x the corporation's average salary increases.
Or....you retire at 50-60, come back as a contractor, and pocket the whole rate (less income & self-employment taxes of course) because you've got benefits through your retirement or your spouse.
At least that's what controls engineers seem to do.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
And I've known 64 year old java programmers who programmed the pants off younger workers with a few years experience.
Is that how you get their pants off? Well, I never learned Java, so who knew?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Likewise, younger workers have open said on slashdot that older workers "don't fit their culture".
The response to which is of course that if this is the case, your culture is effed, and you should probably work on that. Hiring an older worker or two would be a good start.
FWIW: I'm pretty sure this happened to me a few years back when I was in my late 40's. I got through 2 rounds of technical interviews with no problem, and then got a really weird call from someone at Google HR that appeared to be designed to somehow trick me into saying I'm a manager and don't actually program any more. The problem is that couldn't be farther from the case, so we had this really bizzare dancing conversation about how much coding I do for about 10 minutes, until she apparently heard something she could use and ended the convo. Got my "rejection" letter ("rejection"? You fools called ME) in the mail a week later.
Just something for others to compare notes with.
I'm in my mid-50s. My own programming productivity peaked around age 45. Youthful fast-learning minds that don't tire quickly have an advantage. Aged minds with lots of knowledge and experience have an advantage. The two trade-off, with a peak (in my case) around age 45.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
We who where in our early 20s when the Internet and Linux revolution arrived, are 45 years or less (I'm 41). So, it seems correct that this is where the peak is ;-) And the peak will move up as we grow older too ;-)
Wait, I thought California was the Left Wing Worker's Paradise that was going to secede from the rest of us naval gazing, redneck reprobates?
You mean with all that liberal conscientiousness they've created a hellscape that only serves the rich and their impoverished server class?
Say it aint so!! I'm shocked, shocked I say. This is the same disappointment I felt when I found out that the Fundamentalist Baptist preacher who sermon'd endlessly on sexuality was a cruising for twinks online.
I have been approached many times (maybe 7?) by Google. I am now over 50! I'm not interested. I had to nominally get G's legal dept involved to stop the unwanted contacts... Got SPAMmed one more time by accident along with (apprently) ~1000 others recently by fumble-fingered recruiter... %-P
And aren't most people in white-collar jobs at peak earning potential in their 40s? I always assumed so. I have only worked a few weeks for anyone else in the last 30 years, but I always assumed something similar would apply to me.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
For some reason experience seem to be of no value any longer. Sure the youngsters not knowing any better will happily work 100+ hour weeks. But the experienced worker will do the same work or better clocking in normal work days, because you know experience. And then go home and have a life. And it turns out that having a life outside of work, makes for happier and more productive people. Who would have thought?
FWIW: I'm pretty sure this happened to me a few years back when I was in my late 40's. I got through 2 rounds of technical interviews with no problem
Two rounds of face to face interviews? If you had that, then the first round of interviewers must not have been able to make a definitive hire/no-hire decision.
then got a really weird call from someone at Google HR that appeared to be designed to somehow trick me into saying I'm a manager and don't actually program any more
A call from HR seems extremely unlikely. I suspect you were actually called by a recruiter, perhaps because the second round of interviews was also inconclusive and they were trying to decide whether it was worth trying a third time. If so, you might have been better off if you'd said you don't program any more, since it would indicate that there's a good chance that if you did some prep work to blow the rust off, you could pass the interview process. If, on the other hand, you are in practice and still couldn't get a strong "hire" signal in two rounds of interviews, then it's unlikely a third attempt would be any different.
FWIW, Google hired me seven years ago at age 42. Many others on my team were hired in their 50s and 60s. In my time with the company I've seen no evidence whatsoever of ageism, though I've obviously only seen some small slices.
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I make about 1/3 of that and I'm 60. Since 2008 my pay has dropped by more than half. After age 50, you'll be lucky to be working. If you're 60 and out of work, it'll be time to work for yourself, because nobody will hire you. You blow the healthcare costs for the company out of whack. The excuse for not hiring the older worker? He's not a good fit which means, he's too old even though he meets all the rest of the criteria. Health insurance is the problem, not the solution.
When it comes to the difference between the trades and college paths I am reminded of the story of three friends, of which I am one. We met in a community college trade program. All three of us were recently out of the military and drew together.
We had a similar starting point; but ended in different places. One of us went directly into a trade, repairing office equipment. Another bounced around a bit between various county and state technical jobs until he started his own HVAC business.
The friend who started his business was able to do it because his mother poured, quite literally, everything she had into his business to get him started. I remember delivering some of her personal jewelry to be sold in order to raise money for his business. He is now doing ok. We are all now in our 50s and he is pretty much completely broken down from the physical demand of his job. However, financially he is now stable (and has a lot of great guns, I love going out to his place just to see what he has added to his collection).
The other friend tried to stay in Office equipment too long. As he got older his numbers declined and he was let go right about 50. For reasons not understood by me, he decided to take that “opportunity” to get his college degree in a field that doesn’t hire people over 35 unless they are entering with a tremendous amount of experience. He is now delivering pizzas and struggling to hold onto his house.
Me, I saw the writing on the wall. Right around the time the company I was working for canceled the defined benefits pension program I looked around and realized that I saw no old guys. I went back to college and got my BA and eventually my MBA. I am not tall or good looking, I lack family connections and there was no way I could afford an expensive internship. I came from one of Americas poverty areas and, without question, it is part of who I am.
I was able to get a job teaching and took the accreditation over a period of a couple of years of evening courses. I now work as a teacher in rural district that, due to the number of immigrants, has many very urban problems.
What does this short biography have to do with the trades? Of the three of us one made it in the trades, mostly because his family had the resources to prop him up as long as it took to become stable. One just plain left, bounced around and left the trades. The other tried to stay until he was pushed out.
Those promoting trades, look around. Do you see many old guys in that trade? How many 60 year olds? How many 70 year olds? As we push up the national retirement age who is going to hire that 70 year old?
I do not think trades are wrong, what I think is wrong is how our society treats tradesmen. As long as people are nothing but disposable cogs to be discarded once they are worn I am concerned about the pure trades’ path. It can, and I think should, be part of a person’s life
Okay... here's some evidence. Now at least you can't say you've never heard or seen evidence of google senior managers making comments about employees being âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter."
http://www.evetahmincioglu.com...
If you work at Google and one of the founding employees of the mega search engine company starts calling you âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter,â your days may be numbered.
Thatâ(TM)s what Brian Reid, Googleâ(TM)s vice-president of engineering, is claiming happened before he was fired at age 54 from the company. He worked at the tech giant from 2002 to 2004 and detailed a host of old-guy bashing comments on the part of Google employees in his suit against the company.
This former Stanford professor who said he got great reviews, believes Google, based in Mountain View, CA, gave him the axe because of his age.
His case was thrown out by a lower court because the direct manager who fired him never said a disparaging word about Reidâ(TM)s age, at least not to his face. Even though other Google staffers made fun of his age, the court viewed those comments as âoestray remarks,â and not relevant to Reidâ(TM)s case.
Well, the stateâ(TM)s highest court ruled yesterday that those stray remarks may indeed matter and the case is now moving forward, much to the chagrin of employers across the country.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yeah, as long as it doesn't go down (or maybe even keeps pace with inflation?), I'll be in good shape when I'm looking at retirement in 20 years.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
That'll get you fired from Google these days, too.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
ProgrammerInstance.Pants.Remove(true);
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There are so many different programming languages ( Java, C#, Python, Scala, C++, Javascript, Fortran), API's and frameworks that are changng every six months, that it is more important to have someone with experience in the latest technology in the last few years that it is to have experience over 10 years.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
And experience from a 22 year old is much more credible to a 28 year old manager than the same amount of experience from a "greybeard" who is 50 years old.
Aside from that, we really need single payer health care badly because companies know a 22 year old is 99.999% likely to cost them nothing (if they self insure) per year while an older programmer is 50% likely to cost them $1,200 or more annually.
Pre 2008 some companies were caught dumping young people with chronic diseases that had no impact on their ability to do the job. But they were costly to self-insuring corporations.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm not sure what to make of some of the numbers from the article.
Salaries peak around age 45 and then level off or drop. Looking at the last chart, I see that salaries start leveling off at around age 35. The averages don't come with any confidence intervals so I'm not sure if any real conclusions about the trends can be made. There are also distributions in the survey responses, so maybe the median might be a more representative statistic.
The global average salary is hard to believe. All listed US cities are significantly below the global average, except for San Francisco which is barely above the average. The only way this number could be accurate is if salaries in non-listed, non-US cities are way higher than in the US or if the overwhelming number (say like 90%) of all US survey respondents live in San Francisco.
The article also says that the data includes "420,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year facilitated through our marketplace" including "69,000 job seekers". That seems like a huge number. This is the first time I've heard of hired.com, but apparently they are connected with a significant portion of all job interviews and offers in the tech industry. The article also mentions that the data also includes "survey responses from more than 700 tech workers on the Hired platform". The implication is that the 700 internal responses are weighted more than the other responses because otherwise those 700 responses would be statistically insignificant.
Okay... here's some evidence. Now at least you can't say you've never heard or seen evidence of google senior managers making comments about employees being âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter."
"Evidence" is a strong word to use to describe the unsubstantiated claims of one former employee. I'm not saying it's not true -- I have no idea -- but I don't think it rises to the level of "evidence".
In addition, there's little reason to expect that what happened in 2003, when Google was a much different company, is indicative of the situation today. It's worth pointing out, for example, that the executive named in the suit was 38 in 2003 which means he's now 53.
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So, not a good idea to change careers for tech, in your 40's?
As a data point, I did an extensive job search this last year at 53. Although I'd heard that market value decreases with age, it was a bit surprising to me how sharp the drop-off was. I do, of course, hope that your experience is not like mine. But prudence suggests that you assume that your market value at 55 is similar to what your market value at 35 was, and will decrease from there. Plan accordingly and godspeed.
Yes, we all get old. Which is one reason young people should care more about the employment rights of people older than they are.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sa...
So far, 269 people have joined a class-action lawsuit against Google claiming they were discriminated against in the workplace based on their age.
The scope of the lawsuit against Alphabet's Google division was revealed in a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Howard Lloyd and follows what he referred to as a âoelengthyâ hearing that took place in a San Jose on July 26.
The lawsuit originated in 2015 with plaintiff Robert Heath and was certified as a class-action in 2016.
When plaintiff Cheryl Fillekes joined the case in 2015, she claimed that because of her age, Mountain View-based Google did not hire her for an engineering position for which she was qualified, which she alleges violates the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act. In court documents, Fillelkes claimed that a recruiter told her she needed to put her dates of graduation on her resume so the company could view how old she was.
In October 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled that more software engineers could join the lawsuit. The lawsuit represents over-40 job applicants who sought engineering jobs at Google but say they were discriminated against because of their age.
[See the full complaint below]
"We believe the allegations here are without merit and will continue to defend our position vigorously," said Google spokesperson Ty Sheppard. "We have strong policies against discrimination on any unlawful basis, including age."
In recent years, Google has maintained it has policies in place to guard against age discrimination in the workplace. Last year, Judge Freeman reportedly responded:"Having such a policy does not necessarily shield a company from a discrimination suit, particularly in light of the evidence and allegations presented here ... today, most, if not all, companies are well versed in anti-discrimination and make great efforts to ensure their written policies comply with anti-discrimination law."
Itâ(TM)s not the first time the search giant has been accused of age discrimination. In 2004, Google was sued in a case that was ultimately settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
Silicon Valley's tech industry skews young. As of late last year, the median age of workers at both Google and Menlo Park-based Facebook was just 29 years old, according to the Huffington Post. Last year, Hewlett-Packard was sued by former employees who claim that the company had deliberately and unfairly acted to become a "younger" company.
Laurie McCann, a senior attorney with the AARP, which advocates for older people's rights in the U.S., recently stated that ageism in the tech industry is a "very big problem." Two-thirds of older tech workers say they have either experienced or witnessed age discrimination at work, according to a 2013 survey taken by the organization.
A study by recruitment platform Hired cited by the Financial Times suggests that once tech industry workers turn 45, they often see the number of job offers fall and their salaries plateau.
"People brag about how young the average age of their workforce is and say downright derogatory things to older people, almost like they are above the law," McCann said recently, speaking generally about ageism in Silicon Valley's tech industry.
Guess you've been lucky.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I suspect that 45 is probably around the age at which most people stop improving. Young people are often motivated but ignorant. Older people are more experienced, but past a certain point (particularly in a tech field) experience doesn't add much because things have changed. Most of the things that you learn in 10 years of experience will be beneficial. In 20 years, a load of the stuff you learned early on will be either irrelevant or actively harmful. In 30 years, a lot of the stuff that you learned early on will be counterproductive (seriously, try reading code from someone who still thinks that a modern processor behaves like a fast 386 - you can often make it much faster by just stripping out the optimisations). If you think that the last 20 years of experience are the most useful, then someone aged 55 doesn't have much of an advantage over someone aged 45, unless they happen to have specialised in something particularly useful.
I'm not even 40 yet, and a load of the stuff that I learned early on in my career is now painfully obsolete to the degree that if I made decisions based on it then they'd be exactly the opposite of the sensible course and most of the things that people are willing to pay me for relate to things I've learned in the last 10 years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Many metro areas in the Midwest feature a similar standard of living but with a MUCH better ratio of salary to cost of living. (Examples: Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, arguably Chicago) They do suffer higher than average levels of poverty, crime, and corruption, but these are of limited relevance to ordinary people, who typically live in safe but affordable suburbs and have no reason to go to the more dangerous parts of town.
Nonaggression works!
Guess you've been lucky.
Maybe. But you're assuming that the allegations are valid and also that they're systemic. I see no justification for either of those assumptions.
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And taxes here with AMT are around 50%, so 400K -> 200K
Cost of living is crushing along with abusive confiscatory taxation and the tech companies are ALWAYS trying to flood the market with H1B and scabs to lower your "rate"
How're those leftist policies workin' out for you over there in Commiefornia? Not so good?
Aw, that's a shame. Now we just need to figure out how to quarantine Commiefornia and prevent the infection from spreading. Then we can all sit back and have our kids learn the object lesson that the Commifornians are setting as an example.
It's getting so bad here that people are leaving, driving housing prices up and making traffic worse.
Two rounds of face to face interviews?
Nope, that isn't how they do it. You get a phone interview with a technical person, tied to a Google Doc. They give you a coding puzzle and you implement something (language of your choice, or even pseudo-code. Doesn't matter, since its not being compiled).
I got two of those. IMHO, I knocked the first one out of the park. The second one was a bit tougher, but I think I came up with something useful. As near as I could tell really the main thing they were querying me for was knowledge of things like design impact on O() time behavior and efficiency/maintainability tradeoffs. That's the kind of things the interviewers seem to be asking me about as I went.
But as a guy who's been writing software since his grade-school hobbyist days 40 years ago, if you give me a software design quiz, you really are playing into my strength. Its like giving a strength test to a bodybuilder.
A call from HR seems extremely unlikely.
That was exactly what I thought when I got called. But no, she identified herself as being from HR in Cali (as opposed to the recruiters who made the initial calls to me, who were I believe reported being based in Texas.) I don't remember getting asked a single question by her other than the ones about if I was a manger. And of course a few weeks later I found out Google hired a co-worker of mine from a less intensive software group who was 20 years younger.
You're right that there could be innocent explanations for it. That's the thing about prejudice, there could ALWAYS be some other more innocent explanation for it. Any time a woman gets interrupted, there could be a innocent reason it happened that once. Any time a black guy has trouble getting a bartender's attention, there could be an innocent reason. Its only in aggregate where things become obvious.
Two rounds of face to face interviews?
Nope, that isn't how they do it. You get a phone interview with a technical person, tied to a Google Doc. They give you a coding puzzle and you implement something (language of your choice, or even pseudo-code. Doesn't matter, since its not being compiled).
I got two of those.
You got two phone screens? That's unusual. The normal process is one phone screen to decide whether or not you are brought in for on-site interviews. The on-site interviews are the actual interviews. If you got a second phone screen, that's because the engineer who did the first one couldn't decide whether you should be brought on-site.
So, I think what happened was the first phone screen was so-so, and the interviewer couldn't make the call. Or maybe it was bad, but your resume was good enough that they thought maybe you just had an off day. So they scheduled a second one. It's not common, but it happens.
BTW, I do lots of interviews at Google, both phone screens and on-site, as well as do campus outreach to teach students what to expect and how to do well, so I'm very familiar with the process.
IMHO, I knocked the first one out of the park.
It's actually quite hard for you to know that. Google interviewers are asked to try to make everyone's experience good, regardless of how well they do in the interview. To make that work, we generally start with a simple question then move to harder questions, or, better yet, use an open-ended question that can start simple and become increasingly difficult. So weak candidates get only the simple questions and feel good about having done well. Better candidates get further and feel good about having done well. Sometimes really outstanding candidates walk away feeling like maybe they didn't do well, even though they blew the interviewer away (not ideal, but sometimes it's hard to gauge the difficulty when you're interviewing someone really, really good).
This "leave them feeling good" bit is not easy to pull off in all cases, but really good interviewers are masters at it. Anyway, the upshot is that your feeling about how you did doesn't mean much about how you did, one way or the other. The fact that you were less certain about the second probably means that the second interviewer was less experienced.
As near as I could tell really the main thing they were querying me for was knowledge of things like design impact on O() time behavior and efficiency/maintainability tradeoffs. That's the kind of things the interviewers seem to be asking me about as I went.
Yep, that's what they asked you about, but it's not what they were looking for. Google interviews are focused on seeing how you solve problems. Interviewers look to see how you go about working your way through a problem you haven't seen before. The language of the conversation is algorithms, data structures, big-O time/space efficiency and coding, but the real focus is on how you think and how you solve problems.
That was exactly what I thought when I got called. But no, she identified herself as being from HR in Cali (as opposed to the recruiters who made the initial calls to me, who were I believe reported being based in Texas.)
I still don't think she was HR. HR has no role in the hiring process at Google. Recruiters gather and screen the resumes, engineers do the interviews, more engineers sit on the hiring committees to make hire/no-hire decisions, recruiters generate the offers. HR doesn't come into the picture until you're hired.
You're right that there could be innocent explanations for it. That's the thing about prejudice, there could ALWAYS be some other more innocent explanation for it.
I don't know how to say this gently, so I'll just be blunt: You didn't do well enough on the phone screens to make the case for bringing you on-site. I stil
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Man, I started seeing it when I was 30 years old in the 80s. It was systemic then and older programmers had more protection then than they do today.
As I quoted above:
"Two-thirds of older tech workers say they have either experienced or witnessed age discrimination at work, according to a 2013 survey taken by the organization."
So sure, you are in the third that has been lucky so far.
But we've had people claiming to be google employees post on slashdot that old people didn't fit their culture.
The most likely case is you will be involuntary let go from your current job and then suddeny find none of your experience matters and you can't even get an interview. Hold on to your job while you have still got it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Oh yea, and this has been in the news almost annually, it was trivial to find cases. Yet, you've never heard of it or seen it?
That takes some serious kind of blindness, rationalization, and willful ignorance.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I didn't say I hadn't heard of it. I said that there were nothing but allegations, nothing proven. You're assuming they're valid. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. From where I sit, I don't see it. We'll see what happens.
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The most likely case is you will be involuntary let go from your current job and then suddeny find none of your experience matters and you can't even get an interview.
Vanishingly unlikely in my case. My expertise (cryptographic security) is in very high demand across the industry. Moreover, my specific experience in Google over the last several has put me in close contact with lots of major industry players, and built up a lot of expertise and knowledge they'd love to have (nothing secret; it's all open source). I could have a dozen job offers next week, either contract or full-time, my choice.
I'm not claiming my position is typical. It's not. My career is hitting kind of a sweet spot at the moment. But I also know lots of other "individual contributor" engineers at Google who are significantly older than me and plugging happily along, doing their work. Including one in his 70s (who has no financial need to work, but likes it).
From everything I can see, if you're a software engineer at Google, no one cares how young or old you are, what color you are, what gender you are (if any), or used to be, what you look like, what you wear, etc. If you can do good work, you'll keep your job, and you'll get paid commensurate with that work.
It will be fascinating to me to see what comes out in these various legal proceedings.
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