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Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

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Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#111

Post by heisenbit »

lallysingh wrote: post #42
softwaredoug wrote: post #13

In my 20s I worried about losing my intellectual abilities in my 40s and 50s What you really just lose is patience for BS :) Sure, yeah, you lose 10% of your raw intellect if you stay healthy[1]. You probably more than make up for it in experience and wisdom. But hell the thing that demotivates me is the recycled insanity of large organizations, egotistical tech executives, hype cycles, and all the other BS. Eventual…

The problem is, so much of is BS that it's physically painful to keep up. Look, someone reinvented a basic lisp-ism in their mediocre language! Yes, new buzzwords for each part that was a function parameter to the original system! Yay! Now you can reduce your boilerplate by 10%! The system is still an unmaintainable ball of mud, but at least your for() loops can now have ridiculously high jitter and concurrency landm…

When faced with a ball of mud or spaghetti I recommend putting all what can be factored out in a micro-service and connect them via RPC to REST endpoints. Make your services are stateless so you can scale effortless and put an API gateway in the center so you can manage. As the service business logic isn‘t really stateless put your state in a caching server. Actually you can‘t trust a cache so also put in an opaque field into your client interface. Any problems you encounter can be solved however considering the number of services to be build a fully dynamic CI/CD pipeline is a good investment for potential developer demand first.

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#112

Post by asdfman123 »

JohnFen wrote: post #29

I'm an older (than you!) developer, but I have no special resources related to that. But for what it's worth, here's my experience. I've found that nothing is really much different being an older developer compared to being a younger one, aside from two things: I have a lower tolerance for bullshit, and I have a much better handle on what my time is actually worth to employers. While ageism is certainly a thing that…

> take a good look at me, because you will be me sooner than you think

Genius.

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#113

Post by rlawson »

kokanee wrote: post #83
JohnFen wrote: post #29

I'm an older (than you!) developer, but I have no special resources related to that. But for what it's worth, here's my experience. I've found that nothing is really much different being an older developer compared to being a younger one, aside from two things: I have a lower tolerance for bullshit, and I have a much better handle on what my time is actually worth to employers. While ageism is certainly a thing that…

I'm in my mid-30s and facing the reality that I do not want to be a manager, but have a hard time picturing myself coding into my 60s. I'd be curious to hear more about what in your eyes separates "certain parts of our industry" that aren't suitable for older devs from those that offer good jobs which pay what you're worth. What kind of attributes would you look for in a company or product if you were searching for a…

Look for companies that make money off the real world (not software) but need software to run. Pay is less but stability and work/life balance much better.

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#114

Post by euroderf »

softwaredoug wrote: post #13

In my 20s I worried about losing my intellectual abilities in my 40s and 50s What you really just lose is patience for BS :) Sure, yeah, you lose 10% of your raw intellect if you stay healthy[1]. You probably more than make up for it in experience and wisdom. But hell the thing that demotivates me is the recycled insanity of large organizations, egotistical tech executives, hype cycles, and all the other BS. Eventual…

> What you really just lose is patience for BS :)

I bailed from coding after full-day Java debugging session that made no progress. Way too stressful at+after some age.

So the BS was technical, not peoplal.

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#115

Post by stucotso »

Older dev here.

I went from junior dev / 'young hacker' type profile, to a VP and exec level management of SMB class orgs, also did Silicon Valley roles in both eng and management.

My take, by far experience makes you able to solve problems in a way that is basically not possible taking a 'young hacker' approach. I can't say anything about cognitive decline other than forgetting my car keys - when it comes to tech the muscle memory seems to vastly overcome that plus some.

I think what we mistake for age decline often - is time allocation related. I know younger devs working and sleeping at office (and loving it). Where I can't do this due to many factors - kids, family, hobbies, overall a larger desire for non work related time. This explains the majority of 'knowledge gap' I see at work. Domain knowledge, especially if the tech debt variety only gets one so far however. In my experience leveraging experience and judgement far outweighs knowing a flavor of month curly brace language syntax.

The single biggest detriment to techie career progress I see is 'writing the wrong software'. Startups that go nowhere. Projects with no value. Solutions with no problem to solve. The 'slightly pessimistic' bias experience gives when writing software seems to catapult one -way- beyond what's possible otherwise. In fact this same bias I think is what enables engineers more experienced to drive up productivity of entire teams/orgs/corporations even.

This reminds me of the old joke about a very expensive consultant after fixing machine with one hit of a hammer. "My price includes 1% cost to swinging hammer, 99% to knowing where to hit."

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#116

Post by softwaredoug »

asdfman123 wrote: post #105
softwaredoug wrote: post #13

In my 20s I worried about losing my intellectual abilities in my 40s and 50s What you really just lose is patience for BS :) Sure, yeah, you lose 10% of your raw intellect if you stay healthy[1]. You probably more than make up for it in experience and wisdom. But hell the thing that demotivates me is the recycled insanity of large organizations, egotistical tech executives, hype cycles, and all the other BS. Eventual…

I think, generally speaking, you get less "hungry" as you get older across the board. Sure, you could become excellent at guitar in your 40s, but unless you're extremely motivated, you probably don't care about learning it as much as a teenager would. Same goes with learning or becoming anything else. (Of course, everything here is on average. )

I disagree, the avg age of someone starting a company is 42[1] :)

I honestly think its truly just about filtering BS. I get hungry about the right things. Just like I get passionate about the right relationships. But not goin to drop everything for someone that shows the tiniest bit of interest me like maybe when I was young and had no idea what kind of relationship I wanted.

1 - https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/this-is-the-avera....

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#117

Post by bcrosby95 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #13

In my 20s I worried about losing my intellectual abilities in my 40s and 50s What you really just lose is patience for BS :) Sure, yeah, you lose 10% of your raw intellect if you stay healthy[1]. You probably more than make up for it in experience and wisdom. But hell the thing that demotivates me is the recycled insanity of large organizations, egotistical tech executives, hype cycles, and all the other BS. Eventual…

My biggest "problem" was when I had kids. I used to spend a lot of my free hours not directly working, but thinking of work problems. So I'd be playing a video game, at a party, or whatever, but in the back of my head I was also thinking of work.

After kids those unpaid thought cycles are spent on how I can help my kids grow into better adults.

It actually forced me to change my work habits a bit. Before I could be less methodical about working through a problem because I had lots of spare brain cycles outside of work. But now I have to work through problems more diligently.

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#118

Post by lelanthran »

Balero wrote: post #91
javcasas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

39 here. I'm significantly better than in my 20s. Much more knowledge and wisdom, a bit less raw brainpower. But I know I can force myself through hard stuff (prolog, category theory, ML research papers) but only if I can kick out instant gratification for a while (reddit, hn, videogames). I remember this week more than 10 years ago where my graphics card died, and had to go with this ancient card with zero accelerat…

How much of this "less raw brainpower" is due to age, and how much is due to potentially having a less focused mind? I have massively noticed issues with my concentration, and I don't think it's due to age, so much as to watching Youtube and reddit. I guess what I'm getting at is it's sometimes hard to untangle what changes are due to getting older, and which ones are due to the world changing. For me it's boredom, I…

As far as maintaining focus goes, I had a lot of trouble doing so after 40.

I wrote a small program[1] to help me maintain context between different projects, and I'm now more productive than I was in my 30s.

[1] I tried all the personal task management and task tracker tools, even wrote a few of my own. It turned out that my brain works differently to how the tools want you to work. My new tool which works well to keep me on track matches how I work.

IOW, now I don't have to adjust my brain to the tool, the tool is already adjusted to my brain's process.

Re: Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

#120

Post by fnordpiglet »

cgh wrote: post #81
fnordpiglet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what is me as I head into my 50’s. I always knew it was BS, but now I can’t ignore it any more. Corporate culture garbage drives me absolutely to depression now, and I can’t force myself to care any more. I love teaching and mentoring and leading and programming and all those skills. But I can’t muster up to energy to give a crap about anything other than the work itself, the team, the product, etc. I more cl…

I quit my job at a Silicon Valley BigCorp two years ago, almost to the day, for these very reasons. Luckily, we are in a position where I could just do what I wanted during this time, mainly go rockclimbing and help my wife in our worryingly enormous garden. But I miss certain things, like being in the room (whether physically or virtually) with a bunch of smart people and solving problems. And of course I miss the m…

I’m working on building my own quant/stat arb/HFT trading fund with a few folks from my career as partners, self financed. I think that’s the out. I love what I do but investors, customers, hierarchy, and the band wagon that follows I think is the genesis of a lot of the BS.
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