The guy worked at Apple in the '80s. Why on Earth would you want to leave that out? That has to impress more people than would be turned off by him being 50.
There's lots of reasons other than the H1B thing, all of them stupid.
* Tech d'jour. A lot of startups are actually under pressure to list all the latest greatest often fad technologies just to impress investors. This has been my biggest problem lately. I've got years of dedicated study to a core language that I can just stomp the competition with most of the time but oops... I don't have 3 years experience in that framework that came out 2 years ago that takes a few days to pick up.
* Lousy hiring strategy - It's kind of like what I used to observe on dating sites where people would list these absurd shopping lists of must-have requirements. The limits they put on eligible partners, or in the case of hiring, qualified employee hiring pools is absurd. Sure you might find the guy that has all of the things on your list but how freaking long does it take to pick up a newer or older version of something you already know. It's a misplaced focus on overly precise requirements over general quality of the candidate. Some people would rather have the mediocre guy with their exact bullet list than somebody smart enough to pick up near-anything you want quickly. Sadly, I met my wife by getting into a fight with her on Craigslist but this hasn't helped me out with any jobs yet.
* Incompetent leads running the show. We've all met them. They don't want to learn anything after college that they don't have to. Why they stayed in tech, I have no idea but they're out there and sometimes it's just easier to scoot them up to management where they still feel like they have to have their own tech limitations lowering the bar so they can understand what you're doing. Even if it's not really their job to be nosing around in the specifics.
* Lazy HR. Some people will always see it as a resume pile culling process, even when the skills they're looking for are rare or hard to come by in certain combinations. The more reasons they can get to toss somebody in the 'nope' pile, the fewer people they ultimately have to talk to/deal with.
* Lazy teams not policing the HR ad copy. The HR people don't know anything about versions. If it's a clueless hiring manager that's to blame the blame should also fall on the tech people who didn't stop them and tell them that getting overly explicit wouldn't be necessary.
Don't be too sure that's always the hidden motivation. I'm a very strong core JavaScript dev with only 6 years of experience and plenty of the latest stuff but that happens to me all the time. I could write a decent book on JS and I've had tech interviews stop early and get moved to the next phase based on my expertise with it but I'll lose out because I didn't learn or don't have years of experience in the 1 out of 6 popular app architecture frameworks d'jour that they wanted. Just stupid stuff that takes a couple days to get competent with, a week or two to really master.
Sometimes you have to sit down and self-teach some of this fad-tech junk just to get past the people who think finding qualified candidates is like ordering on a menu and will ignore the fact that you're a monster on the core technologies because of some triviality that within a week or two of hire won't matter a tenth as much as how much depth somebody has in the actual language.
Also, you might be running into a common programmer prejudice. You only have C/C++ on your list. That bugs me less than just C# or Java or Python, (definitely just JavaScript - very little excuse there since we're exposed to so much via back-ends we work with) but a lot of devs are skeptical of people who have been at it for more than a couple years and only learned one language, or perhaps more accurately one language and the same language with a giant robot OOP arm bolted on to it.
I'm not even sure what's meant by "hardware" precisely, but how does one collaborate in regards to it via internet tools? If you're configuring, testing, dealing with physical stuff do they have to mail it to you or something? The only remote QA I've ever worked with was offshore... and it was really bad with no motivation for it to get better since these guys had no connection with the team whatsoever. I'm not saying remote QA can't be done right but the idea may have left a bad cultural taste in a lot of engineers' mouths.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of legit and/or stupid but culturally powerful reasons people won't do remote. You have to be reducing your options by at least 95% in any job to take a telecommute-only policy. I'm sure age discrimination exists but I wouldn't expect it to be so bad that you won't even get hired anymore. But you might need to let go of remote-only if that's something you can control.
People don't like to write. You telecommuting requires more writing. And how are middle-managers supposed to feel important if they aren't filling those conference rooms to capacity at all times?
Maybe I've just never been on anything huge enough but I just don't see how cutting corners on security saves you a lot of time for the actual code-writing part of it. It might save you time on talent acquisition or vetting third party stuff, I suppose.
It's never quicker. It's just stupider. Success at buying congressmen to steamroll all opposition and obstacles for you doesn't equate to a smart product.
Oh they answered. It's just not a very satisfying answer:
"We don't WANT to spy on Grandma, we just want to be able too without any of that legal stuff getting in the way and slowing things down. Don't worry, there will oversight by a select few who don't have to tell you anything about it."
Hmm.. you might like Chicago if winters and total absence of terrain variation doesn't make you batty. I wouldn't send my kids to public schools in the city though. We have some of the country's worst and best.
It's not a valid argument to compare to downtown San Francisco, lumping that with all locations in the bay area within an hour's transit commute from the city. If you put big house over location, then yes, I would definitely not recommend NYC or the Bay Area. You couldn't pay me 2x250k to live in South Florida however.
There are so many Java devs, priority #1 is typically to cull the herd of applicants but they're mired in this approach. Looking for reasons not to hire people is a really stupid way to try and find top talent. I had a YouTube interview that was mixed but I felt like I impressed the smartest of the interviewers and did decent on most questions. Problem was, there were four separate people to impress and one of them decided he didn't like me right out of the gate. Correcting him on something he was wrong about was my biggest mistake. They told me I could come back in a year but why the fuck would I bother? They didn't even ask me about my strongest asset and the only peer within my specialty that I talked to was a total douchebag.
To be fair, their smartest guy was a total badass. They have plenty of talent at YT at least but it's not across the board. What really struck me though, was that at no point did anybody ask me what kind of a job I was hoping to find at YouTube. Big-shiny-brand is great on your resume but perks don't make up for quality of work and learning new and interesting stuff. They did absolutely nothing to try and convince me to work there. They just gave me a shit-sandwich of an interview.
We pretended it was a travesty they weren't more encouraged to take math seriously. As it turns out they're perfectly capable of outperforming the boys at math. I think "closing the gap" is a stupid goal but it is important to recognize how cultural buffoonery can limit your talent pool. I sure as Hell don't ever want to work in a corporate IT department for culture reasons and I'm empirically a pretty damned good web UI developer and all-around confident dude. Intuitive types tend to bother traditional IT people. I don't think it's any surprise women tend to lean in that direction.
Speaking as a JavaScript developer, I would say "==" is closer to Harrison Bergeron equality as it coerces the operands to the same types before comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
I like giving it in hex. If they can figure that out, odds are good they care more about talent than age, regardless.
That's why my children will wear potato sacks until the growth spurts stop.
The guy worked at Apple in the '80s. Why on Earth would you want to leave that out? That has to impress more people than would be turned off by him being 50.
There's lots of reasons other than the H1B thing, all of them stupid.
* Tech d'jour. A lot of startups are actually under pressure to list all the latest greatest often fad technologies just to impress investors. This has been my biggest problem lately. I've got years of dedicated study to a core language that I can just stomp the competition with most of the time but oops... I don't have 3 years experience in that framework that came out 2 years ago that takes a few days to pick up.
* Lousy hiring strategy - It's kind of like what I used to observe on dating sites where people would list these absurd shopping lists of must-have requirements. The limits they put on eligible partners, or in the case of hiring, qualified employee hiring pools is absurd. Sure you might find the guy that has all of the things on your list but how freaking long does it take to pick up a newer or older version of something you already know. It's a misplaced focus on overly precise requirements over general quality of the candidate. Some people would rather have the mediocre guy with their exact bullet list than somebody smart enough to pick up near-anything you want quickly. Sadly, I met my wife by getting into a fight with her on Craigslist but this hasn't helped me out with any jobs yet.
* Incompetent leads running the show. We've all met them. They don't want to learn anything after college that they don't have to. Why they stayed in tech, I have no idea but they're out there and sometimes it's just easier to scoot them up to management where they still feel like they have to have their own tech limitations lowering the bar so they can understand what you're doing. Even if it's not really their job to be nosing around in the specifics.
* Lazy HR. Some people will always see it as a resume pile culling process, even when the skills they're looking for are rare or hard to come by in certain combinations. The more reasons they can get to toss somebody in the 'nope' pile, the fewer people they ultimately have to talk to/deal with.
* Lazy teams not policing the HR ad copy. The HR people don't know anything about versions. If it's a clueless hiring manager that's to blame the blame should also fall on the tech people who didn't stop them and tell them that getting overly explicit wouldn't be necessary.
Don't be too sure that's always the hidden motivation. I'm a very strong core JavaScript dev with only 6 years of experience and plenty of the latest stuff but that happens to me all the time. I could write a decent book on JS and I've had tech interviews stop early and get moved to the next phase based on my expertise with it but I'll lose out because I didn't learn or don't have years of experience in the 1 out of 6 popular app architecture frameworks d'jour that they wanted. Just stupid stuff that takes a couple days to get competent with, a week or two to really master.
Sometimes you have to sit down and self-teach some of this fad-tech junk just to get past the people who think finding qualified candidates is like ordering on a menu and will ignore the fact that you're a monster on the core technologies because of some triviality that within a week or two of hire won't matter a tenth as much as how much depth somebody has in the actual language.
Also, you might be running into a common programmer prejudice. You only have C/C++ on your list. That bugs me less than just C# or Java or Python, (definitely just JavaScript - very little excuse there since we're exposed to so much via back-ends we work with) but a lot of devs are skeptical of people who have been at it for more than a couple years and only learned one language, or perhaps more accurately one language and the same language with a giant robot OOP arm bolted on to it.
It was on the outs. It's starting to pick up again, but not for everything.
I'm not even sure what's meant by "hardware" precisely, but how does one collaborate in regards to it via internet tools? If you're configuring, testing, dealing with physical stuff do they have to mail it to you or something? The only remote QA I've ever worked with was offshore... and it was really bad with no motivation for it to get better since these guys had no connection with the team whatsoever. I'm not saying remote QA can't be done right but the idea may have left a bad cultural taste in a lot of engineers' mouths.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of legit and/or stupid but culturally powerful reasons people won't do remote. You have to be reducing your options by at least 95% in any job to take a telecommute-only policy. I'm sure age discrimination exists but I wouldn't expect it to be so bad that you won't even get hired anymore. But you might need to let go of remote-only if that's something you can control.
If you want to save a few bucks, save a few bucks. But don't pretend it's because you're the victim. That's not very adult at all.
People don't like to write. You telecommuting requires more writing. And how are middle-managers supposed to feel important if they aren't filling those conference rooms to capacity at all times?
Maybe I've just never been on anything huge enough but I just don't see how cutting corners on security saves you a lot of time for the actual code-writing part of it. It might save you time on talent acquisition or vetting third party stuff, I suppose.
It's never quicker. It's just stupider. Success at buying congressmen to steamroll all opposition and obstacles for you doesn't equate to a smart product.
Is that now I have to take all of the not-obviously-batshit conspiracy theories seriously.
Wow. Progress. Maybe next they'll start thinking about what they've been doing all these years.
Oh they answered. It's just not a very satisfying answer:
"We don't WANT to spy on Grandma, we just want to be able too without any of that legal stuff getting in the way and slowing things down. Don't worry, there will oversight by a select few who don't have to tell you anything about it."
Meant to follow with "but very little choice over which of the two you get."
Hmm.. you might like Chicago if winters and total absence of terrain variation doesn't make you batty. I wouldn't send my kids to public schools in the city though. We have some of the country's worst and best.
I love telling people when they do that. Happens in client-side web dev all the time. Hilarity.
It's not a valid argument to compare to downtown San Francisco, lumping that with all locations in the bay area within an hour's transit commute from the city. If you put big house over location, then yes, I would definitely not recommend NYC or the Bay Area. You couldn't pay me 2x250k to live in South Florida however.
Reason: Java dev culture
There are so many Java devs, priority #1 is typically to cull the herd of applicants but they're mired in this approach. Looking for reasons not to hire people is a really stupid way to try and find top talent. I had a YouTube interview that was mixed but I felt like I impressed the smartest of the interviewers and did decent on most questions. Problem was, there were four separate people to impress and one of them decided he didn't like me right out of the gate. Correcting him on something he was wrong about was my biggest mistake. They told me I could come back in a year but why the fuck would I bother? They didn't even ask me about my strongest asset and the only peer within my specialty that I talked to was a total douchebag.
To be fair, their smartest guy was a total badass. They have plenty of talent at YT at least but it's not across the board. What really struck me though, was that at no point did anybody ask me what kind of a job I was hoping to find at YouTube. Big-shiny-brand is great on your resume but perks don't make up for quality of work and learning new and interesting stuff. They did absolutely nothing to try and convince me to work there. They just gave me a shit-sandwich of an interview.
We pretended it was a travesty they weren't more encouraged to take math seriously. As it turns out they're perfectly capable of outperforming the boys at math. I think "closing the gap" is a stupid goal but it is important to recognize how cultural buffoonery can limit your talent pool. I sure as Hell don't ever want to work in a corporate IT department for culture reasons and I'm empirically a pretty damned good web UI developer and all-around confident dude. Intuitive types tend to bother traditional IT people. I don't think it's any surprise women tend to lean in that direction.
Don't confuse fat for muscle.
If men were better at it, we wouldn't get lumped with being the only ones who are sexist all the time.
Can't we all just get laid?
"Of course, this may also have ramifications for what skill and career proclivities each sex exhibits."
Speaking as a JavaScript developer, I would say "==" is closer to Harrison Bergeron equality as it coerces the operands to the same types before comparison.