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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?

#81

Post by PerfectElement »

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…

You should know that you can't say you like .NET on HN without getting a bunch of replies telling you why .NET sucks.

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

#82

Post by steveklabnik »

miserable1980 wrote: post #72
broodbucket wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

What would a "K&R for Rust" look like to you, and how is the official book deficient in this way?

(I have my own grievances, which is why I'm working on a second revision, but feedback is helpful.)

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

#83

Post by volaski »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #76
volaski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This just means you haven't met enough people. You probably met some people who worked on embedded systems where they only need to use a simple set of instructions predefined by the device. But imagine doing that for your laptop. Personally I learned assembly when I was into hacking operating systems (not as in the diluted 'hacker' notion people throw around nowadays for merely being able to write a simple html code, but as in actual 'hacking' to make the OS work in ways its designer had not intended) and from my experience it is the farthest thing possible from being simple. Teaching 14 year olds to write assembly code? Read up on my analogy above.

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

#84

Post by learc83 »

coldtea wrote: post #49
learc83 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As for your hourly rate I can tell you from experience the global market is making it very competitive so suck that up. I haven't had much problem with this. I don't compete on price because I can't bid lower than someone who has a cost of living 10x less than mine. One thing I've learned is that the higher your rates go, the less the global market matters. Few companies are willing to pay for $100+ an hour out of c…

> I haven't had much problem with this. I don't compete on price because I can't bid lower than someone who has a cost of living 10x less than mine. The problem is that those 10x-less cost of living people can increasingly compete on quality too. Without some sort of protection inside their own country, it's "yay" for businesses and "tough luck" for IT workers. The HB1 (or whatever) visa thing is part of that. In the…

I agree that some labor protections are needed. However language barriers, cultural differences, and time zone gaps add enough of an overhead to communication that most companies willing to pay my rate won't hire foreign programmers just to save a bit of cash upfront.

Then you have the legal issues I mentioned. Contractors in other countries are for the most part outside the reach of US courts in the case of contract disputes.

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

#85

Post by aprdm »

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.

I was an embedded system engineer (degree in computer engineer)

I've designed RTL with FPGA, worked with embedded linux, device drivers, bare metal c and etc.

the problem with embedded is that :

1. There are almost no jobs when compared to other kinds of software development. All the embedded jobs have been outsourced for so long and I don't see this trend reversing

2. The pay is really low for what you're expected to do. Really, really low.

I've made this thread before the transition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158023

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

#86

Post by andywood »

agentgt wrote: post #61

Big picture... things could be far far worse for you. Its pretty hard to give any sort of advice with such little information. I'll just say you really can't fall in love with the technology but rather you should love solving problems... ie be technology agnostic. There are lots of real world problems still left to be solved. I also have some doubts that you seriously took advantage of working at Microsoft. I can tel…

This was my 2nd go-round at MS. I also worked there for 5 years, earlier in my career, and had a better time. This time, I was working as a contractor, so switching teams was not an option. And again, the day-to-day was so horrific, that soldiering on was also not an option.

As far as my goal - that's what I'm trying to figure out. For practical purposes, it may be mostly about avoiding webdev. However, this most recent job was not webdev, yet it was still an absurdly convoluted architectural hodge-podge. So, one thing I may be looking for is more homogeneity. It's not about size or complexity, per se. I've worked on many large, complex projects and had a good time.

What turns me off about webdev is a) new frameworks being hyped every month, and b) the architecture of a modern web app gives me a headache. I want to return to a time when I used to spend most of my time on data, algorithms, and writing code, with a single API being the worst "necessary evil" in the mix.

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

#87

Post by rhapsodic »

You have one of the most marketable skills in the world (programming), you've been at it for a good while (at least since C jobs were commonplace, apparently) but you're sleeping on couches and only lasted 4 months at your last job? I suspect there's a lot more to this story than you're telling here.

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

#88

Post by dasil003 »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #29
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…

> I meet a lot of older developers who harp on about assembly and coding mainframes [...] but they got fuck all done in a day.

Except for making a JS engine that is fast enough to run your framework dujour.

All the leverage in high-level coding comes from the stability of the underlying layers. Even though those lower levels see less churn, we absolutely need people to maintain them, and these dev bootcamps certainly aren't churning out candidates who fit the bill.

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

#89

Post by justin_vanw »

You are clearly omitting the most important part of your story. Are you an alcoholic? Bipolar? Do you suffer severe depression where you stop showing up for work for weeks at a time? Schizophrenia?

I wish you the best, but it is silly for you to act like you 'just can't deal with it' rather than just admitting the real issue and trying to get help.

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

#90

Post by BingsF »

PaulHoule wrote: post #65
estefan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You haven't lived if you haven't filled a disk at some point.

While true, this doesn't make for a good excuse to let your employer's server go down when its disk fills.
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