Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?

It's so much more than lines of code. And in my experience, programmers who started later in life can pick up how to code pretty quickly, and they don't need to be amazing coders, because I've found them to be realllly good with all the other stuff. I've found them to be cautious, good at communicating, able to think about problems at an abstract level, very dutiful and see the importance of things like documentation and keeping boards up-to-date etc.

When I was 21 and coding, I was rising the ranks as a coder pretty quickly, but I lacked the maturity to see the bigger picture, I neglected processes - and even dismissed them, I didn't think about things like reliability, I didn't really think about product fit or all the none code related things. I didn't even see them as my concern half the time. In fact I'd go as far as to say I was a bit of a liability at times.

So, I've found older programmers introduce an air of calm, wisdom and diligence that, certainly I had absolutely none of as a precocious 21 year old programmer.

In fact, I work with an intern who's a fair bit older than me (I'm in my early thirties), and I'm often amazed at the things he considers and mentions, things I hadn't given a second thought to, and they're not necessarily technical or code related things, they're the bigger picture things and ideas, that are just as vital as writing code. Oh, and he's gotten to be a good coder in a short space of time, too. I think older folks are more focussed and methodical learners generally. I spent most of my 20's trying to learn about 10 programming languages, badly. Rather than learning the few I actually needed to an intimate level.

So in summary, I've found that older programmers have life skills and experience that help them get up to speed that perhaps younger programmers lack. And they also tend to be better and all the none-code but vital skills, which I certainly lacked when I was in my early 20's. I absolutely love to see a mix of ages in a team, because they bring different skill sets.

I am just now starting to feel like I can no longer be competitive as a professional developer. The younger people I work with just seem to get more work done. I feel like I understand aspects of business, software complexity, and practical aspects of development better than most people I work with and have worked with, but those are also becoming more common skills. I very much enjoy writing and working on my own open source projects, which is what I plan on doing, but I will profoundly miss social interactions around developing large systems as a part of a team.

If you are 30 and enjoy programming and you can get paid adequately, then I don’t think you have any problems with your career choice.

After that, there are three things matter a lot for your productivity:

1. Deep and broad stack knowledge is not learned overnight. Over two decades of career I've done everything from writing kernel patches and fixing malloc bugs all the way up to publishing state-of-the-art transformer research. I didn't have this in my 20s. I was a child who knew C++ and algorithms.

2. Seeing the right change to make is hard. This can be the right product (as a 20-something I had lots of opinions about this but most were contradicted when I actually got 5+ years experience as a PM). It can be about engineering design, where taste is still subjective but has long-reaching consequences. It can be about the feeling that that odd result is actually serious enough to look into deeply and not just excuse away.

3. Cross-domain knowledge. Deep competence in programming is powerful. Combine it with deep competence in another field and for the right problem set it's a superpower.

A 20-year-old prodigy doesn't have any those. You can have at least the third and arguably a head-start on the first two.

Pick an area to work in that overlaps with your previous experience and you've an excellent shot at becoming the best of the best in it.

Source: over 40, programming since childhood, better than I ever was and still learning and improving.

I created htmx (intercooler 2) when I was 40 and it has been far more successful. I also created hyperscript when I was 40.

I'm working on new stuff as we speak.

I could have made a lot more money by moving over to tech management at around age 30, which is what I think sucks a lot of programmers out of the game, but I like writing code.

I do have memory issues compared with when I was younger, but I've been coding so long that the total set of stuff I know about is huge comparatively. I'm also much less intimidated by technical challenges since I have a lot more techniques I've successfully worked with and I'm more patient with problems.

I'm definitely not the same programmer as I was in my 20s, I can't do weeks of 12 hour days in front of the computer like I could then, but now I have a much better and more intuitive understanding of what needs to be done, so I waste a lot less time.

I tried to summarize what I've learned here:

https://grugbrain.dev

But, to answer the original question... wait, what was the original question?