One can be good at writing code at a young age,and it is not rare to meet such people.
However,writing software and working with others,these skills come with ages.
Ages of hard working and love and sweat.I am 36 now and just beginning to see things different and more fundamentally.
Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
41–50 of 151 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#42The logic you are presenting really overestimates the (important) daily work of the vast majority of people in math and programming.
It also overestimates the actual work and results these prodigies will eventually arrive at.
Very skilled mathematicians solve hard real world problems with math from the 17th century. None of them rediscover Calculus and linear algebra from scratch, and they also don't need to excel relative to the field oft mathematics or engineering. Nor will they move the field of mathematics forwards. That even goes for many very skilled researchers.
Very skilled programmers solve hard programming challenges by effectively "gluing" code blocks together others have created. They don't need to advance the field of computer science for this.
The idea that math, engineering or programming only make sense if you have a shot at rivaling the likes of Peter Scholze and Terence Tao or even popular programmers like Carmack is ridiculous.
Also: many child prodigies (like those kids finishing Masters degrees <20 and winning competitions at 14) are people you never hear from ever again afterwards because they move on to perform the same (still important) "mundane" tasks as anyone who finishes their degree at mid 20 or even 30.
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#43No it isn't. There's a whole lot of programming beyond what a fictive HN crowd considers state of the art (even if it isn't in the proper sense, quite the opposite; but let's not go into that). It's just that those mature fields don't nearly get the airtime, since HN is a news site after all.
So there's a lot of programming going on in older stacks such as Fortran, COBOL, J2EE, etc.; the reason being that lots of apps were started when those stacks were current (eg. turn of the millennium saw a boom of e-commerce apps), and business is hesitant to change tech for change's sake. Isn't that what we're praying here all the time, like avoid big-time refactorings/rewrites?
As a corollary, the downside of this is that, as you mature, you see tech choices, unwillingly or not, as cyclical/generational, and dominated by a desire to find a niche in the industry and for job security rather than objective criteria more than we're willing to concede.
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#44Entirely false. Many people allow themselves to be intimidated by child prodigies that they know. This website is full of them.
I'm in a similar boat to you, and honestly, there is a vast spectrum of work involving programming, that covers competencies all the way from very non-STEM creative folk fiddling around with code to make something look prettier, to the darkest depths of AI frontiersmen tirelessly challenging the boundaries of mathematics.
All are valid. Do something meaningful to you.
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#45--I don't think progressing in mathematics is only for young people, fields medal winners are typically in their late 30s, early 40s. I guess whether or not that is "young" depends on you.-- Nope. See child comment. Anecdotally, my best experiences have been with older programmers. I worked with a guy in his 60s who had some absolutely incredible personal stories to tell (he hitchhiked from Europe to India in the 70s…
> don't think progressing in mathematics is only for young people, fields medal winners are typically in their late 30s, early 40s. Fields medal is for mathematicians under 40 years of age.
Haha, wow, I am an idiot.
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#46I don't particularly think so. But I do think I know why that perception exists. Programming is an incredibly fast growing field. The number of devs 30 years ago was vastly lower then now. So naturally it follows there are less older people who are top programmers.
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#47Absolutely not.
It could also be a young woman's game.
One of the joys of programming is that, with regular exercise, it seems to get better and better. I look at problems today and solve them in my head in minutes before touching a keyboard, whereas I would have dived-in and spent weeks hacking as a kid.
Youth brings many advantages, along with sheer energy (the ability to pull all-nighters) another is simply time. I won awards in a different industry in my 20s simply because I was able to indulge a project for weeks, without kids and other responsibilities.
Today I'd have the wisdom to;
1) Question the assumptions behind the "need"
2) Use something else I already made
3) Get someone else to do it
Like sports I think that maintaining "coding health" is a thing. We get rusty if we don't hack from time to time. That said, I have a good "baseline fitness" and pick-up a language I haven't coded in for 20 years with a few weeks of revision.
If anything a tragedy for older programmers is getting less and less reason to use hard-won skills. I hope older programmers get more recognition as an undervalued resource, as I still actually enjoy writing code.
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#48I'm by no means a prodigy, I'm in my mid-30's, and mostly a UX designer who write a bunch of code. Yet I build a bunch of stuff for a clinical trial team for a hospital system; I build systems that gather data that inform clinical outcomes.
I'm not some elite prodigy, but it doesn't matter... programming is just a tool. Yes, I won't win any competitions, and I've never done leetcode, but that's a SMALL sliver of all the industries that need people to write solid code. In the end it's the outcomes and products that matter, who cares what code you write?
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#49First, 30 is not an appropriate cut-off. Maybe 40-45+
The skill does not go away, but the will and energy to apply it, to start something new, does. But overall it's not too bad, maybe statistics are skewed to the very young because they need to start somewhere so they re more prolific by necessity, but it should plateau after taht very early period.
Re: Ask HN: Is programming a “young person's game”?
#50Yes! And No!
It is in the sense that it takes time to learn, and the industry moves fast. Keeping up with new tech and new trends while also having 'old person stuff' like a family, a bed time, other responsibilities like fixing your house and mowing your lawn, make it far harder than if you're a young person who can sit down at 6pm after a day at work and grind through tutorials until 3am instead. As you get older that stops really being much of an option.
If that sense programming is definitely a young person's game.
But old dinosaur developers like me (I'm 45) don't really need to do that to still be useful. We understand that programming is much more about communication and people than it is about code. I still enjoy learning, and applying the craft of software engineering, but I get a lot more from solving problems and making people's lives better with what I build. If I can see that a problem will be better solved without 'moar codez' then that's the route I'll take.
In that sense programming requires life experience, and that definitely isn't a young person's game.