Comment by owkaye | Hacker News Reader

Comment by owkaye | Hacker News Reader

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If you need someone to fix it for you I can certainly use the work.

Sometimes it irritates me to see so many people apparently complaining about the shortage of competent / qualified programmers these days. I'm more than 50 years old with nearly two decades of professional experience as a programmer. I ran my own outsource programmer training center in Asia for several years and we ran more than 200 trainees through the system before we closed.

I also have an additional range of business experience that might come in handy to a future employer, especially in a company run by people much younger and less experienced than me.

And I'm not afraid to put in 12 hours days for weeks on end when it's important to the company.

But I never see any job listings for people who can bring what I want to bring to the table. Instead I typically see complaints about startups not being able to find qualified engineers. Yet I've been back in the USA for more than a year already, and so far I haven't been able to get a single startup to consider hiring me.

Is it my age that puts them off? Or should I be looking for work with companies other than startups? Or am I looking at the wrong startups?

Or should I just do my own startup and stop trying to help with someone else's?

I'm not criticizing, but just giving my two cents here to give perspective.

The problem with being 50 years old is not being 50 years old, but coming across as acting 50 years old.

Startups don't need someone who can manage an outsource program to train 200 employees. They need someone who can ship. Someone who is implementing features and building product value.

Culturally startups today want to stay small because that's a competitive advantage that allows pivoting until you either have a home run business model or can be acquired by a larger competitor.

I don't know you or your situation, but instead of calling attention to what you did in the training center in Asia, tell the community about what you've built. What's in your GitHub profile?

As far as training is concerned it's better to train a half dozen brilliant rock solid (as opposed to rock star) programmers that can ship.

I think it's absolutely awesome that you are programming to this day and willing to put in the 12 hours, but I think it's better to see that zeal for training to use trying to creating a hardcore team of "special forces" developers instead of a whole platoon of "grunts" or "marines".

The people who want what you have offered to bring to the table are enterprises. If you want to go after startups, you need to start focusing on startup scale projects. If you are talking about more than 6-8 devs on a team, it's already too large.

On top of that, it's important to be building teams with balance, just like a small special forces team in the Navy Seals or Army Rangers. You need to be able to train and lead people that complement each other and can build a whole product, front-end, back-end and everything in between.

Again, I'm not judging you here. Just putting in perspective that what you are offering in your reply is not what I see the HN community asking for.

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