Naw, we use C. Not a lot of kids applying who have the skills necessary to think about low level code that has to be small and efficient. We'd like more junior people I think but they're hard to find and if they're competent there's a lot of competition to snatch them up.
You can be the world's greatest engineer and yet have zero skills for starting your own business. There's very little overlap between those two skill sets.
If you have your own business then you live every day on the edge, you have to invest your own money and property into your own business. With a job you let other people do the gambling instead. Five years on a job that goes bankrupt still earns you 5 years of paychecks. Five years on your own business that fails may mean you have nothing to show for it.
Younger programmers tend to work loooong hours, because they think they'll be rewarded for it. They're handy to get all the grunt work done once the design is hammered out, though you do have to monitor what's going on so that they're not going full steam ahead in the wrong direction.
Well, older programmers actually know how to do stuff. They've seen the paradigm shifting technologies rise and fall on a regular basis. They know what the mistakes are because they've made all of them.
Hey wait now, Google still uses old fogey languages like C, C++, Java, and assembler.
I'm not so sure here. Young kids recently seem to act like know-it-alls who hate conforming the group environment; everything you do they see as being done the wrong way as it's not the same as what they did on their last job or what their professor talked about. Older workers, or those of a certain age, had to learn by necessity to learn new tools and discard old ones on a regular basis, and ever new job they took required them to learn to adapt to the new situation.
The older workers can be molded because they have plenty of experience with being molded. The younger workers still have this idealistic vision of how everything should be done. Older workers have patience earned through experience, and it's much more common for me to see the younger workers as the ones who are easily frustrated.
The kids are the ones who only write in their preferred language in my experience, which is probably the only language they know.
"Director" is not earned from technical competence, but from political maneuvering and brown nosing. Ie, it's a reward for loyalty. Good companies will spot this and be much more picky about how gets to be director, but bad companies will be chock full of director level people who are incompetent at being a director (even if they were competent at their lower rank jobs).
But then remember that director has to be a brown noser and political player as part of the actual job itself. They must deal with higher level executives daily. Maybe it's better to have the incompetent kid in that director job than wasting the talents of a competent older worker.
They don't pick an inept person to do the interviewing in order to filter out the expensive candidate. Instead Google has a policy that totally inept people must do the interviewing. The interviewer seems to be either chosen at random or in a round robin fashion. The intentionally choose interviewers who are from different departments or fields than the person being interviewed.
It would seem the only time such an ridiculous interview strategy could work is when you're interviewing for entry level jobs. Thus the median age is still in the junior cadet range.
Ya, their interview structure is utterly incompetent. They randomly pick people who may not have the necessary skills and experience for the job that they will evaluate a candidate for.
Except that there is real and positive progress! It's not a "cure", but there are now treatments for types of cancer that had none a decade ago. Every cancer is different, and the chemotherapy that works for one may not work for another. And there are better chemotherapies that cause less damage to non-cancer cells.
It makes sense though. You start with a small lie and you get sucked into it and pretty soon it's a lifestyle.
For example, I once claimed to understand computers in order to get a job and now I'm chief architect of a multinational tech giant. A user once asked where the missing files were and I was so flustered I blurted out "I don't know, maybe they're in a cloud somewhere", and suddenly the whole industry of cloud storage was born. Meanwhile I have a sneaking suspicion that the IT group has given me a Speak-and-Spell as my new laptop. I would complain but I think I'm more productive now.
This is not my beautiful POS!
Using it since 1990 though is pretty standard. It's harder to change the code for this than it is to design a brand new system from scratch. Half the departments will start screaming at you for making unnecessary changes, and the other half of the departments will scream at you because they fear thousands of customers being locked out of their systems.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
