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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?

#71

Post by dceddia »

georgemcbay wrote: post #31
hkmurakami wrote: post #3

Have you considered embedded software? What you describe and long for (including all the constraints) seems to match the needs and challenges of embedded development. Example of places would include TI, Intel, Atmel, etc., and also hardware makers that use their chips.

This is good advice. As a somewhat older (42) programmer whose early career was similar to what OP is describing I've been focusing on embedded systems and most recently Android development -- granted, Java isn't C and there are quite a few things I dislike about the language (and moreso the AbstractFactoryOfFactoriesClass culture it tends to have) but it is (practically speaking) MUCH closer to the sort of desktop a…

Ahh, good old AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer.

http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.2.0.BUILD-SNAP...

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

#72

Post by miserable1980 »

broodbucket wrote: post #25
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.

Given one of the OPs annoyances is the continuing churn in tech tools, please don't waste time with Rust. The premise of the language (safety) is seductive but it comes at the cost of complexity. I am an experienced dev that spent a month evaluating it and then decided life was too short. Frankly, it is easier for someone with a C background to work in C++ than it is with Rust. That's because you can use the simple features of C++ to get going and add on complexity as you learn more/need it. With Rust, you get thrown into the deep end right at the start with the complex borrow/ownership system. There is no proper book yet on Rust (some good online sources where I commend the people on effort ... but there is no K&R).

P.S. I used Go for some projects last year and found the situation to be much better. The Go book that's available on the website reminded me of K&R ... readable in a weekend of two. This should be the criteria for new programming languages IMHO.

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

#73

Post by partisan »

estefan wrote: post #63
officialchicken wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. Don't the "DevOps" administer, provision, and manage your systems? Have you ever seen a unix guru who didn't have scripts and use automated tooling? And when a system fails (and they all fail eventually) the routine is the same no matter what you want to call it.

At one company our "unix guru" didn't bother to set up anything like ganglia so when the server's disk got full and brought down the product he looked like an idiot... Maybe it's good vs bad but it happens. In the puppet/chef era I'd have said you needed to have a background in coding to be a good devop, but ansible has changed that now I think.

Hindsight is 20/20. Plus, you learned from his mistake and now, anywhere you go, you can remind the unix gurus to prevent that type of thing from happening.

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

#75

Post by miserable1980 »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #16

Perhaps sign up and participate in the Launch Hackathon[1] at the end of the week? Best case scenario you start your own company. Worst case scenario? You have a fun time just sitting there crunching on a problem you're interested in. [1] http://www.launchhackathon.com/

How popular is this event? I signed up for it and was surprised by its format (winning teams get investments). Any links to experiences from past events? We should have a HN contingent :-p

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

#76

Post by monk_e_boy »

volaski wrote: post #47
monk_e_boy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Aside from rest of the comments, this is such a ridiculous comment that I can't tell if it's a joke or not. Have you actually built anything meaningful with assembly language?

No. But having met a few assembly coders over the years, every story seems to involve tons of work making something simple happen.

This guy wants a job. That pays money. Are we all going to tell him that assembler is the path to riches? Maybe for 1% of guys out there.

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

#77

Post by monk_e_boy »

klibertp wrote: post #60
monk_e_boy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Really? Any pointers on how to get started?

Google?

Most countries need teachers, contact that department of the government and start from there. Get into a school, watch some lessons. Then get a teaching qualification.

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

#78

Post by jqm »

I live in a small town and used to work with a guy who was Microsoft Windows phone support at one point before they transferred the role to India. He wasn't a programmer. He wasn't an admin. He was phone help support as in "I can't get teh google to come up when I push the power button... pleaz help!".

He has gotten the best job offers in the area including an interview for head of IT for the entire school district. He doesn't even have a college degree. He is good guy and I enjoyed working with him, but at the risk of sounding dismissive I didn't observe him to be very motivated nor a top level problem solver nor see that he possessed much high level knowledge.

Point being... with people who don't know better the word "Microsoft" on a resume is a golden ticket and a guarantee that one is top caliber talent and highly knowledgeable. So there is that in your favor....

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

#79

Post by BinaryIdiot »

miserable1980 wrote: post #75
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #16

Perhaps sign up and participate in the Launch Hackathon[1] at the end of the week? Best case scenario you start your own company. Worst case scenario? You have a fun time just sitting there crunching on a problem you're interested in. [1] http://www.launchhackathon.com/

How popular is this event? I signed up for it and was surprised by its format (winning teams get investments). Any links to experiences from past events? We should have a HN contingent :-p

I've never participated in past launch festival things but it's my understanding last year drew in about 1,000 developers for the hackathon which distilled into teams (though not sure how many). It's certainly an interesting event!

Also I feel like a vast majority of the people would have to be part of the HN contingent, lol.

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

#80

Post by mattmanser »

bragh wrote: post #28
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 cos…

I wouldn't lose sleep over performance problems. C#'s much faster than most of the other languages. Most of the ASP.Net MVC sites I've written have sub-50ms server responses even on tiny VPSes.

One of my old employers had 100s of installs of its VBscript, then ASP.Net, program, with a complicated salesforce-esque application that clients could customize themselves with extra code, so there was a wide range of code written by programmers of wildly differing ability. And they did all sorts of crazy stuff.

Almost all performance problems were SQL related.

In the 3 or 4 years I was there we had a bug with IIS once, some crazy specific thing, I can't remember it exactly but it would be like if you'd chose a very particular and obscure variable name and the value passed via query string was this one very particular value it would cause that thread to hang. Even that was fairly trivial to identify because a google search brought up an MSDN.

And when we were genuinely stuck by then we had some sort of partner status and could phone them up. When we were using silverlight when it first came out our technical director actually ended up chatting to one of their core programmers about a specific bug. I seem to remember this only happening with silverlight and with a very obscure tech we were using (some sort of strange clientside control that IE6 had that you wrote in vbscript that no-one really used that I honestly can't remember the name of now).

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