51–60 of 105 posts
Conversely, I'm 30 and lost all enthusiasm for software after working for the big three. I suggest going to a smaller place where you'll have a bigger impact and, hopefully, good coworkers.
Here's another thing that experience brings though: a sharper focus on efficiency, the ratio of output to input. That is the thing I look for in each shiny new object that drifts across. If it is interesting that will get my attention for a few minutes; if there is a hint that it might somehow move the needle in terms of getting more out of less in, it will keep my attention.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird Al is essentially a comedian, and they only really get good after many years of life experience.
The other day, Norm McDonald noted something about Eddie Murphy that I hadn't considered - he was the most talented young comedian ever. It blows my mind that Murphy was performing at such a high level when he was just 20-21.
Most of my life has been financial apps for banks and finance companies. Business "process" apps too. I am currently switching from game development (last 5 years) to quant finance. I am doing this by getting EPAT and also returning to school part-time for Economics.
I maintain my focus by thinking about what got me into writing code in the first place. I loved it. When I was about 8 I remember my Saturday mornings being spent typing in BASIC code from "The Gazette" magazine while drinking chocolate milk and eating powdered doughnuts (Spaulding Kruellers!). I would type in, debug my mistakes and eagerly wait for the final result. Then I would try and change the code to my own liking. Save it to a cassette and move on. When we got a floppy drive I was in heaven, side note :-)
So, my advice. If you love what you are doing then that is all that matters. If you can't find a way to pay the bills with it then do it on the side, continue to love it and things will fall into place in the future. Even if I am writing code for a company, I don't write the code for them, I write it for myself, I do my best work for myself. Then I do it again on the next project (Yes, I know it is really their code and not mine...but....)
One of the most helpful things that I've done in my life has been to make sets of friends who are different ages than I am. It helps me understand that although there are certain states of life people tend towards, aging isn't as harsh for everyone. When I was 25, I thought that people who were 50 were ancient. But I play with a blues band and the drummer is 73 and still gets under houses to do plumbing. My friends i…
This! Awesomely inspirational answer by the way..
I'm 45, I manage a small team of bright, motivated people at a Fortune 500 retailer. Team ranges from late 20s to one of our Oracle DBAs who's in his 60s; most of our colleagues are late 20s-late 30s. It's a good team, at a chill place to work, and we put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears over the last few years to deal with a lot of the technical debt that was making things like on-call such a miserable experience. Making that experience better has been a huge motivator for me. It helps our team, and it helps our business partners help themselves. One thing about being older is that a lot of younger developers have a different set of skills they consider "table stakes", and they may be overlooking older skillsets that could really help them out, like tuning SQL queries.
The other thing that helps me keep the fire is learning new stuff. For an old-school Enterprise guy like me, things like AWS, DevOps, Docker / K8s, seemed scary. But technologically, they are fascinating, awesome things that are allowing people to do things we couldn't have imagined before. I want to learn about them because maybe we, too, can do awesome tech things, if we got experienced people who at least understand the value proposition of these newer technologies and can make the case for them. It is a very cool time to be in IT. I'm learning C# by writing a crappy 4X Civilization knock-off, I'm going to try setting up a kubernetes lab on my linux box, and I've got O'Reilly and Pluralsight on speed-dial.
I switched to nursing. At 55 I've now completed nursing school, have an RN, and am looking for my first job (at about 1/5 or less of what I could earn as a developer). Programming had become too easy. Now I'm doing something difficult again. Difficult is what, for me, keeps the fire burning.
> Programming had become too easy. what do you meen?
Look at the other post about hooking up the 'smart' doorbell to Slack. That's about as interesting and 'hackerish' to me as using the switch on your surge protector to turn on two lights at once.
Not even 5% of the population "makes it big at 40+" (or ever) so there's that.
"If you haven't made it big at 40+, that means you worked on a lot of failed projects, that makes it harder to believe you can change that." I find it unlikely a programmer, no matter how good, would make it big. There are exceptions, sure, but globally programmer is not a highly paid professional like a surgeon, for example. I don't think there is nothing wrong with a steady paycheck and doing a job that engages one…
A lot of people on HN are in SV (or another big tech hub like Seattle), and make 300K+ in total comp. It's a lot more lucrative [in general] to be a developer in the US than it is in most of the rest of the world.
Anyway, the topic was career satisfaction.
Without any good life strategies the happiness money brings peaks at 70k or such (basically you don't have to worry about regular life expenses). So, I would not use the total comp as a metric in this discussion.