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Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

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Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#51
post #29

I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum: The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid, absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid 2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow an…

It would be interesting to know what the 50-something was like when they were younger. Did they have the characteristics of the 20-something rock star.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#52
When I met him he was 30. Very skilled engineer and he’s on one or two AWS talks for “how we use AWS”. He was also a terrific manager to me but left because he wanted to spend more time developing so he’s now an early employee at a startup.

The second one was the CTO of a company we acquired. Truly the intellectual superior of nearly every person I know. Mid 30s. Helped write a well-used standard.

Funnily enough, while both were great at the leaps of logic often necessary to build new exciting things, both were also remarkably well-disciplined in code. People often tell me that writing good commit messages or variables, indenting their code, writing tests get in the way of their expression or iteration. These guys just did it in passing. I’ve watched them work and they didn’t consciously do it. Like a Navy SEAL and trigger discipline. It wasn’t exceptional. It was the default.

Oh and, the young chap who was 21 or so when I was a grad student who wrote lots of cool utilities at uni. Once, in my insecurity, I remarked that I’d love to work on stuff like that if I had the time (being a grad student). He told me I should make time if I actually loved it that much. Graybeard wisdom from a child. Well, it was good advice.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#53
post #29

I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum: The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid, absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid 2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow an…

Uhg, I'd love to be that 50 year old when I arrive at the age. Sadly, I feel like I'm sliding backwards. Oddly, I feel like I was a better, more thoughtful, certainly more energetic developer in my 20's.

I think some of it may be that each job I've taken has forced me to change language / platform multiple times. I'm an iOS, android, C++, C, Java, and python developer. All on production level code. Never an expert of any.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#54
Most were early and mid twenties; they were my colleague for at most a couple of years before moving on to e.g. Google in Europe or SV startups (working from Ireland until he could get a green card). Another one was iirc late twenties / early 30's, great Scala developer - perhaps too good because his work didn't really land at our customers because they couldn't find any developers that could work with it. (that's more down to Scala than the guy though).

But I don't actually know any developer above the age of 40. If they do anything it's code challenges like Advent of Code, but they've long moved on from software development to e.g. architecture, management, coaching, etc and making more money through that - and giving off an air that they're much more content and at peace with it - than they could with software development.

I'm in my early to mid 30's myself and I'm pondering what I'd like to do beyond software development, I've had enough and ten years of making websites without an opportunity to branch out wears on you.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#55

I actually haven't met many being a scientific programmer in a science with little need for programming. So, I guess I'm the most talented. I was at my best in my 40's, but at 72 I'm still very good, but slow.

Care to tell what makes you slower, compared to your 40-ies? We need to prepare ;-)

Not the OP but to me, as best as I can tell from some self-analyzing, as you get older your brain just doesn't fizz and spark like it did way back when. It works in a different way - more pattern recognition, less raw grunt. Could be because of biochemistry, or maybe just that you don't have the blissful ignorance of youth, you know there are limits, you don't tend to just hurl yourself against the fences quite as readily.

Another factor might be that the industry has changed substantially, which makes you feel slower by comparison. When I started out, there were few libraries or open source. To do anything, you knuckled down and churned out code, a lot of it. These days the first step in any greenfield project is a lot of Googling, and your job is more about identifying products, libraries, APIs and stitching them together. I personally find that a lot more frustrating because of the context switching - hence feeling of slowness, less time churning out your own code.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#56
post #29

I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum: The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid, absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid 2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow an…

It would be interesting to know what the 50-something was like when they were younger. Did they have the characteristics of the 20-something rock star.

I was something of a rock star when younger, but I like to think that even if it turned out I was not Paul McCartney in talent I was at least Paul McCartney in affability.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#57
One was mid-50s, and nearing an early retirement. He'd worked in a dozen or more languages, was working mostly in Python and C (for performance-critical Python extensions) when I worked with him. He'd been significantly involved in the development of the IBM Oberon compiler and environment in the past, as well as done something with OS/2, though I don't know the specifics. Very broad experience, though, including a lot of low-level stuff. He was treated uniquely in the company at the time. He was the only person with an office by himself, he skipped most meetings, and was generally a bit quiet and introverted. He liked to come in, do his work, and go home. He didn't stay late, didn't work weekends, didn't do crunch-time even if everyone else was (because his part of the project was already done, on schedule), didn't go out for drinks after work, usually, though he would go out for lunch with everyone. He was a super nice guy, and generous with his knowledge, he just wasn't into being very social. He wanted to go home, be with his family, and work on his hobbies (some involved code, others were gaming and video production and 3D modeling...so lots of tech hobbies).

The other I met when he was in his mid-20s, he's in his mid-40s now, and I still work with him. He was extremely talented and productive then, and remains so today. He maintains roughly a million lines of code that he mostly wrote by himself (mostly while working an unrelated full-time job). It's a world unto itself (for better or worse, it looks nothing like any other project you'd find in the same language, and his coding style hasn't changed notably in at least a decade), but he delivers new features in an absurdly short time. He's a completely different sort of developer than the previous one I mentioned; the first was always eager to try new things. The latter has built up a system that works for him, and rarely changes...he just keeps churning out code every year at an alarming rate, because he knows the system inside and out. Bugs evaporate in seconds sometimes, once identified and reproduced.

In the former case, I was impressed with the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to drop in on a project and figure it out extraordinarily quickly, and his ability to zero in on what needed to be solved today and what would fall out naturally and easily once the core problems were solved. While in the latter case, I've always been impressed by how quickly he can deliver pretty much anything the project needs. He's written everything from the ground up (including things most people would pull in via libraries)...so, no element of the codebase is a mystery to him. He's looked at the same codebase nearly every day for two decades and he can sit down and be productive immediately.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#58

I have a strong bias: the university crowd (haven't seen old programmers yet). One guy who was about 24/25. He came in already experienced in creating extensions for clang and LLVM. He wanted to do a masters in cyber security. I told him to get a job, but we became friends instead. When I wrote my first if-statement for an operating system course, he finished the entire program. It was unreal to see. Funnily enough I…

Why do these people even go to uni when its such a waste of time. I went to uni for a year and learned absolutely nothing because it was all so incredibly basic that its only useful if you don't know how to learn on your own.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#60
post #29

I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum: The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid, absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid 2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow an…

Uhg, I'd love to be that 50 year old when I arrive at the age. Sadly, I feel like I'm sliding backwards. Oddly, I feel like I was a better, more thoughtful, certainly more energetic developer in my 20's. I think some of it may be that each job I've taken has forced me to change language / platform multiple times. I'm an iOS, android, C++, C, Java, and python developer. All on production level code. Never an expert of…

I think programming is one skill it doesn't change much by language if at all. So if you have a good grasp of OOP principles you're on a good path.
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