Similar things happen with real money all the time. Many players can hack, over charge, short, manipulate etc. It may be less obvious, or somehow perceived legit, but we are not really shielded from other players taking our invested money with all kinds of "financial tools" that are hard to understand. Ethereum is just more direct, more feasible
50+ here. Never had an issue. Many media articles in this context also "consult" or "quote" or "interview" someone from a company that "consult older software developers how to stay in the market". One note: you have to respect it from both sides, and factor out age when young person is your manager or colleague. Your age is not an argument in a technical discussion.
Not everywhere is a high demand market. Brazil here. The job market really wants low paid workers that will work Saturday nights for peanuts. A lot of my older colleagues emigrate to have good technical jobs. Others become sellers or open a restaurant.
Very much agree with this. As someone who’s managed people 20+ years my senior, it always annoyed me when I overheard them complain about reporting to someone younger. I don’t hold their age against them, it should be reciprocal.
But the age gap alone is not a valid reason to complain. The young manager could be in their 30's with over a decade of experience themselves, and they may be highly competent at the work they do. Assuming the young person is not qualified to manage veteran programmers is also a form of age discrimination.
If they're managers they should be in management jobs. If they're not, why should they complain about not being management? Management is its own job, not a "reward" granted for time in service. Not even the military works like that.
The point is that it’s still age discrimination. If someone wants their age to not work against them, they have to be willing to look past the age of others.
Besides age is not an indicator of quality of work, nor are college credentials. I’ve seen much older devs run circles around younger ones, and vice versa.
I am sometimes tempted to tell colleagues "well I've done this professionally since before you were born, so...", but so far I've resisted the temptation. Hope I can keep the streak going :)
Even if you're right, it's not a great argument, because there isn't really a rational counter argument.
If the argument is only based on having more experience - the "I've done this professionally since before you were born" argument - it can be correctly rejected as an argument from authority fallacy.
If the argument is based on a pattern you've seen before that's germane to the situation at hand - the "I've seen this movie before and it ends with regret and a data breach" argument - it can be much more convincing.
You don't influence by pulling the seniority card, you do it with data. If there isn't data to back up your suggested approach being better, it might not be, and you get to learn something new!
Sourcing data is expensive. I think it's best not to underestimate just how much development has to be done based upon gut feel, trust or experience simply because proving it would take too long.
If it's two people arguing their own opinions at each other and neither one has relevant data where exactly do you go from there? The one with 2 years experience or the one with 15?
Sometimes the data is the experience, and it's hard to dump your personal experience on someone and make them ingest it. Sometimes you've tried approach X a couple of times and it always failed, but you don't have a scientific proof it will fail again. You just know from experience if you do X it usually ends up in tears and all-nighters and missed deadlines. Not because you have an Excel table proving it, but because you've lived it.
This is not pure travel, but tilts to residence. So if someone stays the whole year - verification can take longer. The USA was always built on attracting smart, brilliant, ambitious people. Those who bans them now, are using the wealth the previous generations, created in this way that is now blocked. They are cutting the resource from their future generations. But this is good news to the rest of the world - other countries will benefit.
And like other tools their importance is part of the entire tool-set. In many shops tight schedules, management by Product managers or people who are too removed from code cause you compromise every other principle of responsible sane coding. When this happens, unit tests are your only shield from doom. If everybody knows and allowed to write sane, good code with reasonable time to build it, the unit tests are nice to have but not a must
Would say that Jira is oriented to the bureaucrats, the people that gain management and control by moving tickets. The means become the goals, everything is chopped to meaningless small tasks and the language dictates the vision and the capabilities. Negative organisational effect. So better to find an alternatives and avoid Jira if you can.
But there are good tools also. I'm using wing IDE for years, it has excellent debugging: multi threaded debug, remote debug with SSH (which works almost as fast as local debugging), deep introspection to anything on the stack and call chain, conditional breakpoints, powerful debug console that can hook to any step in the call chain of any thread, and debugging a server thread easily which is useful for debugging services and scenarios that can't be fully replicated on a local machine.
I don't know how this whole buyback thing works really, but could they not just do a "sellback" of some of the shares they still own if they now need the cash? (Of course they might have to do so at a bit of a loss.)
Yes. When you see articles about companies raising money through the secondary market or by issuing stock, that is exactly what is happening. An IPO is just the initial offering of stock onto the secondary market. After that the company can continue to raise money by creating and offering more shares for sale. You will also see companies offer other instruments such as bonds and preferred shares which have different legal implications for investors.
As I understand a proportion of buybacks generally (maybe not at IBM) were financed by debt. If this was the case they would have to sell enough to cover the debt and interest first.
Of course they could but dumping all those shares on the market to be sold would lower the stock price. The C-suite isn't interested in their compensation going down, easier to cut costs which may additionally make their compensation go up. It isn't about building a good solid company, it is about getting while the getting is good.
Agreed, but then it seems to me that the buybacks are kind of besides the point, and the real underlying issue is that they don't care about their workers (and/or aren't incentivized to), no? In terms of future flexibility / robustness to unforeseen emergencies, sitting on a big pile of your own stock doesn't seem that different to me from sitting on a big pile of cash, except in terms of the risk profile. (In contrast to paying a dividend, where they really can't recoup the cash if they need it.) I could easily be missing something though...
They’re not ‘sitting on’ a pile of stock; it gets bought back and cancelled. A company can issue more stock any time it likes, so in that sense every company is ‘sitting on’ an infinite pile of its own stock all the time.
