There's definitely inherent bias in much of the interviewing process, whether deliberate or not, for many tech startups. But there's also a high degree of bias once inside them. Older engineers with families often can't really do a team bonding that involves Saturday night playing games getting drunk and stoned, for example. Many startups, as they grow, provide things like health insurance plans optimized for 25 year old healthy males, that are just not that good for families and make it harder on older employees. And there are a lot of younger engineering managers who feel uncomfortable leading teams with older more experienced members in them. I've seen teams grow and older engineers pushed out for fairly arbitrary reasons, despite being good coders. And yes, even in this crazy environment where it's hard to hire.
(And yes when I was young and early in my career I never really paid much attention to it and shrugged it off, but now it's my friends and I see myself getting up there in age now, it is so very obvious, and a lot more prevalent than I ever noticed.)
When someone has nearly 20 years engineering experience (not talking about me, I don't) it is ridiculous to make them jump through some of these interviewing hoops. Sure, some kid fresh out of college might pad his resume - because there's not much to it. But an older veteran with a long resume, not so much. Experience does count. The ins and outs of the latest technology might vary slightly, but the patterns repeat. So much of engineering goes beyond the code on the screen anyway.
The last point is key, and overlooked by young insecure startup hirers too often. Hire smart people with good work ethics that play nice with others.
Having built technical teams numbering in the dozens this is literally the ONLY strategy that delivers long term success in my experience. Unfortunately experience is discounted nowadays...
So, a few years back, as a non-technical founder I lost my technical co-founder in back-to-back startups. This was not a great experience, and made me decide to never be dependent on someone else for getting initial product out the door. I spent every evening for several months learning Ruby, Rails and the periphery of front end stuff needed to get projects finished.
I also went to every hackathon I could - not to win, but to meet other programmers, to sharpen my skills, to learn how to finish something under pressure.
After a few months I started getting contract gigs - nothing fancy but paid work. And a funny thing happened. I loved it. Loved programming. Wished I'd been doing it for the last decade in go-to-market roles. Key was I never let up learning. I read everything. Watched every video I could. Tried katas, built any app I could think of to build. Shortly after that I was able to get full-time gigs.
Nowadays I'm in a great company, doing awesome work and loving every minute of it. Your instincts are right. If you're genuinely dedicated to it you can get your head down and learn the stuff you mentioned. Plenty of folks hiring in the UK for ruby/rails. While it's lost its luster for much of the HN crowd, it's only increased in its broader adoption, and the number of jobs hiring for those skills have multiplied far beyond the available talent.
...having been in several organizations in recent years which are challenged to find enough people, everyone says 3-5 years, but everyone will hire someone with obvious talent, a portfolio of stuff on Github and enthusiasm to learn, at much less than 3-5 years of experience.
Barely employable? ...Ruby/Rails/Full Stack jobs are so hard to fill it's insane. Starting salaries are in the $130-150k range for mid-level $150k plus for senior and even junior level is a six figure gig. Sure it'll take time to get to a hirable state but it's perfectly doable.
Hackathons are a good way to make yourself try to build something in a short space of time with a new language which can teach you more about it than any amount of lessons.
yeah the selective hackathon is a relatively new thing and kinda stupid - like hackathon organizers have some magic formula for picking winners... dumb idea
The early ones did have serious programmers at them.
My first memory of one is Yahoo using it to get people to use its API in London, about 10 years ago. That was when a web API with major data behind it was an important new thing. The openness was quite radical, and linked somewhat to the open source movement.
We (ScraperWiki, Rewired State...) did a bunch of hack days for mainly philanthropic purposes - democracy, journalism and so on. More recently DataKind does that even better.
Now though it has become so mainstream, there are hackdays everywhere. They're being driven even more by marketing, rather than coding. The original purpose feels lost.
Well, it depends on hackaton. Most of the hackatons now are commercial events, designed either to milk participants for free work or promote some third party services.
I remeber when hackatons were made by programmers for programmers, when they were about hacking on actually cool projects and having fun. Those hackatons had some serious devs participating, because hell, even if you're doing this professionally, you need to take a break every now and then and do something just for fun.
You aren't wrong. I've been going to hackathons for many years and there's been a steady increase in folks who are going "to win" rather than folks going for the fun, the energy, the comradeship. Meeting other smart folks, sharpening your skills and having fun were always the big drivers for me and everyone I used to meet at them. I think GroupMe was a turning point. Big win, lots of $$, and that attracted a different kind of person unfortunately.
Did you hear about the student hackathon in Waterloo Ontario, Hack the North? The organizers purposely did not announce anything relating to prizes for the whole event until the end. The funny thing was that nobody even asked! For the finals they ended up giving the top 10 teams equal prizes; there was no 1st 2nd 3rd etc.
You're probably right. last hackathon I went to was two years ago and it was the first time people were actually trying to win. Weirded me out. I stopped going because of that.
(And yes when I was young and early in my career I never really paid much attention to it and shrugged it off, but now it's my friends and I see myself getting up there in age now, it is so very obvious, and a lot more prevalent than I ever noticed.)
When someone has nearly 20 years engineering experience (not talking about me, I don't) it is ridiculous to make them jump through some of these interviewing hoops. Sure, some kid fresh out of college might pad his resume - because there's not much to it. But an older veteran with a long resume, not so much. Experience does count. The ins and outs of the latest technology might vary slightly, but the patterns repeat. So much of engineering goes beyond the code on the screen anyway.