It’s my understanding that there have been cases where the bus stops are blocked by the private buses. Also, legally, those stops are only for public transit vehicles, so the they are breaking the law. This has been pointed out as another instance of the city government and police ignoring the laws when it might make things awkward with tech companies. I’m hardly an expert on this issue though. There are many, many articles online.
As for the “age issue”, I just need to point out that it’s odd that in our society age is one of the few categories left where we might ask a question like that based on a characteristic that can’t be changed. I can’t do anything about my age, just like I can’t do anything about my skin color, or sexual orientation, or height, yet few would ask if I were black would I have trouble working with/reporting to whites, or if I were gay would I have trouble working with/reporting to straights. We don’t ask people if they would have trouble working with/reporting to people older than them. The truth is that we better get used to having older workers in the work place, because we can’t fill all of the jobs with younger people forever— the population demographics just don’t work. I couldn’t care less about the age of my direct supervisor. After all, they can’t do anything about their age either.
As for compensation, even though some companies post every employees salary these days for all to see, I personally don’t believe it’s any of my business in most situations what my supervisor makes. They negotiated their deal, I negotiated mine, if I wasn’t happy with my deal I shouldn’t have taken it. Our job functions are different also, I have over 30 years of experience, since I started programming mainframes professionally as a teenager, so maybe I would be hired directly into management, or coding, or both, but regardless, my job wouldn’t be the same as my direct supervisor. I personally find management less interesting than actually developing software, so if someone else wants to do it good for them.
Also, especially in software engineering, we can’t make the assumption that someone managing a software engineer makes more money than the software engineer they’re managing. That is often just not the case, and hasn’t been for over a decade. For example, when I managed a team of software engineers at a major research university back in 1999, my salary was lower than theirs. I had no problem with that because the opportunity and challenge was worth it.
The truth is that in the vast majority of companies in the United States today, after you’ve been out in the workforce for a while, somewhere above you leading to the top of the food chain in a company there is almost always someone younger, someone richer, and maybe even someone with less experience in the industry.
Just to be clear: when I first started interviewing with a few select SF startups a couple of years ago, I wanted to work with them because I thought the technical challenges they were facing would be very interesting. I no longer want to work with startups in SF now, because I’ve since learned that the vast majority of them are run like frat houses with big checkbooks and no concern about actually producing a real, quality product. They’ll run you through endless rounds of interviews like you’re trying to get the last seat on the next launch to Mars, but if you do get that seat, the trip is tremendously disappointing.
