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Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

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Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#21

Post by spc476 »

I'm 47 and am currently doing work in C, C++ (as little as possible to tell the truth) and Lua. While I'm in a small department (3 man team excluding our temporary manager [1]) I'm also the youngest one on the team (and even more oddly, the one with the most seniority on the team). So I'm sure you'll be able to find something.

[1] The department I work in is needed in our company, but it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the company [2], so finding a manager has been ... interesting as the only other person in the company that understands what we do is a vice president of the company who is busy with other work.

[2] The company as a whole develops software for Android phones. My department is there to support our software on the call processing side of things, so we get to deal with SS7.

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#23

Post by fit2rule »

> I sure miss the "good old days" when you just focused on writing a single app in C that ran on a well-understood machine, or even a single well-understood OS API.

No, those days are alive and well in the embedded/IoT world. I suggest you look into doing some embedded work, if you want to return to that style of development ..

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#24

Post by m0nty »

49 here, I'm not enjoying working in IT nowadays, I think it got old about 5 or 6 years ago. So I quit and I'm pursuing my own projects, doing some programming, and trying not to worry too much. I could have ground it out for a few months more in that lucrative contract I had, but just how long can I put up with being that bored?

Personally, if I have to go back to the circus, I'll probably aim for short contracts or part-time work. If you're looking to reskill, I see plenty of sys admin jobs out there. Except you're supposed to call them "Dev Ops" nowadays. Puppet, VMs, Vagrant, Ansible, cloud computing (Linode, Amazon, etc). It's a relatively small domain which is applicable to many different areas of IT, so you get that "good old days" thing where a little effort goes a long way.

Good luck with whatever you do. Don't let the demons of despair take you, make a deliberate effort to be optimistic and cheerful. You're not the only old horse out there wondering when it all became so complicated. OTOH, it's truly an incredible time to be alive, so much stuff going on!

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#25

Post by broodbucket »

raverbashing wrote: post #2

You can definitely find work in Asm/C level today, at hardware manufacturers mostly (silicon vendors usually) Or look into today's C: Go and Rust

There are very, very few Rust jobs. In a few years, maybe, but I wouldn't make a career move on it yet.

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#26

Post by bane »

Depending on your background, taking a gig in R&D or a rapid prototyping shop can be very clarifying, and you get to use and bring to play lots of old skills the young folk don't even know about.

You don't have to really worry about framework, just pick one. Or you might end up reworking fundamental data structure code, which can be really fun for an exercise of algorithmic design.

On the other-hand, maybe it's time to go multi-disciplinarian, take a gig connected to, but completely outside of your comfort zone. Nothing put me into a state of panicked "I need to learn from the firehose" mode faster than this. I'm not even talking technical work, go be a manager, or an industry analyst, work on soft skills or liberal arts fields. Your old skills can provide interesting viewpoints nobody else has.

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#27

Post by nathan_f77 »

I don't know if this will help, but I can pick the niche for you. Here are the languages and frameworks you should be learning today:

* JavaScript (ES6), Node.js and Express, React

You should also get a refurbished Mac Mini or Macbook, and start learning Swift for iOS development. Put together a few simple apps. There's a lot of jobs for iOS developers.

A lot of Rails developers seem to be moving on to Elixir and Phoenix. So I'd keep my eye on them, too.

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#28

Post by bragh »

Firegarden wrote: post #6

I am 36 and been contracting full time since I was 22. Really I was only an employee at my first programming job. The concern that you have is of technology stack. The concern you are alluding to is how to stay relevant when being an older person. The first concern is easy. Stick with some fundamentals. JavaScript for example is a perfect choice. By now we should all know JavaScript and another example is the Dom API…

.NET isn't cool in the start-up world because of the pricing and licensing issues. You can happily start developing a PHP+MySQL application on a used 100 EUR ThinkPad: good free IDEs are readily available (if you even need one), no licensing headaches and can start hosting it with your nearby 20 EUR/month web host with shell access.

Although the situation is changing for the better in the .NET world, the hardware cost, obfuscated licensing and pricing issues still remain. I had to buy an i5 machine with SSD and 16 GB of RAM to get the same development experience with VS2015 that I had with Netbeans on Linux with 4 GB of RAM. Also, a project in progress went for ASP.NET MVC 5 + Azure SQL on Azure and I'm afraid every day that we might get hit with some unexpected performance or insane pricing issues after the launch. Even the reddit thread on /r/dotnet wasn't very encouraging with regards to that: https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/46rgf6/do_you_run_a...

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#29

Post by monk_e_boy »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #27

I don't know if this will help, but I can pick the niche for you. Here are the languages and frameworks you should be learning today: * JavaScript (ES6), Node.js and Express, React You should also get a refurbished Mac Mini or Macbook, and start learning Swift for iOS development. Put together a few simple apps. There's a lot of jobs for iOS developers. A lot of Rails developers seem to be moving on to Elixir and Pho…

I meet a lot of older developers who harp on about assembly and coding mainframes. Sure, it sounds wonderful, but they got fuck all done in a day.

You should pick JS, something server side (PHP, Ruby, Python, or Node.js) and react.

You'll spend a lot of time configuring libraries and services (webpack or webify) but that's just the way coding is these days. Anyone of us could code some assembler - like OP said, it's fun and easy. We teach our 14 years olds how to code assembler - it's that easy. You don't honestly think you can compete with those skills? You need to learn the hard stuff.

This is what you should do:

Learn all of the above Learn PhoneGap and cordova, use React to create an app. Pitch to companies to put an App out for their website. Use whatever server side tech they use (e.g. 90% of companies will be using PHP) to create a simple Web API for your app to call.

Re: Ask HN: Does this old horse have a few years of useful work left?

#30

Post by monk_e_boy »

andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Errr... sounds like you don't want what to do what the job has become these days. Actually sounds like you don't even want to be working. Have you thought about doing something else entirely, try to find something you enjoy?

Teaching or tutoring. Lots of work there and good money.
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