Comment by softwaredoug

> I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders.

Boy do I feel this one. I'm 20 years in now and holy shit are there are a lot of bad leaders out there. What they all have in common is that they don't want to be gainsaid. Most leaders are completely allergic to meaningful feedback, hardly any of them ever ask for it. A lot of people seem to feel that once they are "in charge" they have somehow become infallible.

It's too bad because like `softwaredoug I love developing young people, most of them are very hungry for mentorship. I find that most younger ICs are very willing to listen and learn, but the leadership sees it as a problem for some reason that they're not struggling on their own on basic shit. What a waste of time of money.

I think I agree, I used to see a lot of highly experienced older contractors who probably had FU money. They had far more experience than any of the leadership and were normally older and would not hold back. This was especially when working with Java/C++ but now even C# and JavaScript obviously have people with ~25yrs of experience working with people with <5 years who could really do with the support. I've seen people like this get dragged out of the building or just walk out and happily start somewhere else the next week due to demand.

To add to this I think it’s important for seniors to have a lot of humility, be open to new ideas, and not be one of these leaders!

Have a lot of skepticism towards our ego and question whether we’re acting on status or actually what’s best.

> Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions

This may well be the value of a senior IC. You will be neutral in most of the situations, so VPs will be more willing to trust you as they know you don't have a hidden organizational agenda.

yeah young business people dont want older engineers that can call them out around. they want other young clueless engineers to just build

Isn't the fact that you hide your age evidence that you suspect ageism? Fwiw, I do the same.

I've had more trouble with other ICs rather than leaders.

It was a staff engineer role, very well paid. I was given a take home task for one interview. I did my research and looked into why they were hiring. I downloaded their app, read all the bad reviews on responsiveness, UI, and such. I built something in one hour that would solve the things they had trouble with over 4 years, as a kind of demo of what I could do if they took me.

When we had the actual interview, holy shit did they attack me. "Open your code on this file. Explain what is wrong with your code. I will not even give a hint otherwise you fail. You must tell me what is wrong with your code."

I did get them to explain the "correct answer" despite the pressure, and they were very reluctant to do so. I checked the code afterwards and even cross-checked it with AI and discovered that they were probably wrong lol.

It wasn't age. It wasn't racism, sexism, etc. It was a technical leader being challenged by the idea of someone else being technically better than them. Juniors can do work as fast as seniors; it's more that seniors are trusted to change culture for the better. If someone has trouble finding someone senior enough, most of the time it's because they refuse to let an outsider change the culture.

I did eventually get another job. Similar situation. Take home interview, vastly modernized code architecture than what the interviewer was used to. But in this case, the interviewer actually wanted to make products, get sales, make the customers happy, make money. So the incentives were aligned and they were happy to bring me in to set up policies and stuff.