Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 555 posts

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#91

Post by selimthegrim »

genedangelo wrote: post #6
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #3

No, probably not the longest-serving, though maybe longest-serving who is on HN. Also: 74 - 57 = 17 years of age when you started as a full time programmer. How did you pull that off in 1963?

I actually was only 16, but turned 17 right after I started. I had finished all the math and science courses in my high school in Mississippi and I had a lot of extra time in my senior year. As a junior, I scored the highest in the U.S. on an engineering aptitude test and got a write-up in the local paper. Mitchell Engineering was trying to get into computers but didn't know how to find people who could program. When…

Whereabouts in MS?

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#92

Post by kristopolous »

pushcx wrote: post #60

Margaret Hamilton started her first job in 1959 and is still working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en... Depending how and whether you count academia, Donald Knuth may have a slightly longer career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth Feels like a decent chance you're third, then. Certainly you're one of the longest-working programmers. Best of luck. :)

Don't forget Ivan Sutherland and Niklaus Wirth. Fred Brooks joined IBM in 1956 and he's still active in research as well; Cynthia Solomon, there's quite a few

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#93

Post by wilsynet »

JimmyAustin wrote: post #21
rsynnott wrote: post #13

Grace Hopper apparently retired from the navy when she was _80_. And then went into consulting. So you’ve a few years to go yet.

According to Wikipedia, Grace Hopper started her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark 1, which would have put her at ~38 when she began. Assuming she worked until her death, that puts her career in computing at a (incredibly impressive) 47 years.

How much of that time was she a working programmer?

As an example, Larry Page may have been a programmer in the very early days of Google, but it's been more than 15 years since Larry has seriously written code for a living.

As opposed to Jeff Dean who is still hacking away at his keyboard.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#96

Post by astatine »

Respect! That's truly inspirational. At barely half the experience with 30 years I keep wondering about what next. I still do plenty of programming in C (which, along with Z80 and 8086 assembly, is what I started with), Python and JS with some dabbling in Go. I find the problem solving part as invigorating and exhilarating as ever. What I do struggle with is the 100x additional lines of code which will be needed to make that initial code usable by others. That is needed and all that, but is stuff I would have done dozens of times in the past in different contexts and sometimes approaches drudgery. I wonder if you have any advice on how to keep the interest from flagging in a project past that initial days/weeks of deep absorption. Thanks again for sharing this.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#97

Post by mark_l_watson »

I think you may be. I got to try programming a Basic timesharing system in 1963 when I was a kid, in 1972 I had a summer job doing FORTRAN, and then started a full time programming job after getting a BS in Physics from UCSB in 1973.

So you have ten more years working than I do.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#98

Post by onemoresoop »

MentallyRetired wrote: post #64
mech422 wrote: post #29

Dam - I thought my 40 years was pushing ... Thanks for the inspiration!

Right? I'm at 22 years professionally and I feel like a dinosaur out here.

Same. I recently got into scheme/lisp and got a newfound inspiration. Seems like older folks were on a better path which got as time passed by more and more corrupted.
Post reply on HN