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It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

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Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#231
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is jQuery too low level for people now?

It's too reliant on state changes all over the place, making even medium-complexity web apps really hard to maintain. I find with Mithril (similar to React but smaller) it's a lot easier to understand how my app gets into a particular state.

Only if you keep too much of the complexity in the front end.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#232
post #139
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely a lot of bad IPA's, but that's hardly even a significant part of the American Craft Beer scene these days.

Googling "west coast beer style" has this[0] as the first result. You could argue that this isn't a canonical source or that things have changed since the thread in 2011--but the stigma is still around. [0] https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic...

I would argue that the IPA fandom hasn't diminished (especially out west), but other things have arisen alongside it.

On the east coast, I see an impressive number of sours and dubbels coming out of craft shops, and the midwest is big on bold, malty offerings like ambers and oatmeal stouts.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#233
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this. And even worse, "I recognize that 'bleeding edge tech' as yet another rehash of something innovated in the 60s or 70s and therefore I'm not nearly as impressed as you by it."

This sort of remark reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFWeoxrhbE8 (or perhaps https://youtu.be/ZjibEkDoXQc?t=19 ) It doesn't add much value to the conversation and whether some tech is really a rehash or not rarely matters. It also makes you sound cynical.

That's because people that say that usually are cynical. And usually right too.

"I've seen people try that 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 years ago. Nobody made it work." Is rarely something that does not matter, and people that can't answer the implicit "why would you succeed?" question usually doesn't.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#234
Being a young software developer it feel a bit out of place to be getting a salary less than someone who has been in the field for say 15 years. My only reason for this is that technology does change really fast, and things should be looked at if the job can be complete. Yes there are a bunch of 'Younglings' that just use the newest freshest flavor framework or scripting language (that can be a nightmare to work with) but if a programmer can make something extensible and maintainable does the experience really need to offset salaries by a large margin... (in my area it jumps from 30-90/hour)

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just Portland, the entire American craft beer scene is infected with shitty, indistinguishable IPA's that all taste like a mountain of hops.

I think its mostly a west coast thing - here in the midwest we get plenty of malty beers!

I feel like American beer is bizarrely segmented. The West Coast (from Colorado on, roughly) is still fixated on IPAs and hoppiness. The midwest is full of great ambers and other malty things, and the east has taken to both sours and darker ales like dubbels.

The non-coastal west I struggle to characterize, but it's putting out a lot of truly awesome beer, including really dark stuff like porters and imperials that I love.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer. Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.

Not just Portland, the entire American craft beer scene is infected with shitty, indistinguishable IPA's that all taste like a mountain of hops.

I stopped drinking IPA's for that reason. I wont try one unless it's recommended by somebody I know has taste. Too much wasted cash...

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relational dbs sure, but there are legitimate scale reasons to use a distributed key value store (for instance). There is no reason to be stuck with PHP today though. It's a very backward language when you compare to something with a modern type system/features (e.g. Go, Rust, Clojure, Java 8+, Scala...). Devs need to have a passion for learning technology. Not because it's the shiny new thing but because the new tec…

Have you looked at modern PHP though? I haven't looked extensively, and I'm not very familiar with type systems in general, but PHP 7 just might qualify as a modern type system (albeit optional) and since about 5.5 it's had pretty modern features like closures and traits. There's also hack-lang (Facebook's extended PHP.)

I have not and you're probably correct that it's not as bad as it used to be. That being said, this looks like a great case for learning new technologies/languages since the language you do know may change out from under you eventually anyway. For instance if a real type system shows up in PHP, prior experience with Haskell or Rust would allow a PHP developer to take advantage of it.

tl;dr: always be learning.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#238

Try being over 60 & gettind cred. "How could you possibly understand bleeding edge tech and emerging trends?" Well...I've lived there for four decades, you?

That's a great response. Right next to some I know saying "I helped design and implement the protocols all your stuff runs on. Yeah, maybe I learned some network programming on the way."

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#239
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should have happened long ago. I did CS and programming as high school subjects and am past 50. The tens of thousands of extra people trained up to solve the millenium bug crisis (that mostly didn't happen) are probably around 40 now. Of my tech friends around my age a lot have drifted into other things - often dramatically different. Some because they were sick of IT (often for similar reasons), and some becaus…

For us younger, but not quite so young folks... what sorts of things have they gone into? Would you say that there is a general trend, or are they all over the map?

In my experience:

* there were quite many who understood that engineering jobs would not be for them and who became teachers as their first job.

* another lot were those who had no interest in engineering, they only happened to end up in engineering schools because that was the place to be. Since their only goal was money, they moved to business/management before starting an engineering job. Some others started with engineering but noticed that they sucked at it or that it did not pay enough, so they moved to Technical Sales (which is a glorified name for just Sales, since they've always shown little interest and aptitude for technique beyond the buzzwords).

* then you have those who gave up after 10/15 years, fed up with the tech environment, the futility of the job, the insane hours, etc. 2 are bartenders, 1 shopkeeper, 1 sailing instructor, 1 gardener, 1 goat herder (caricatured but true), 1 musician, 1 'traveller', 2 unemployed.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#240
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason IPA is so popular is because for so long the american beer landscape was dominated by brews like Budwiser that are quite weakly flavored. This was an artifact of prohibition destroying most of the competitive landscape with the survivors dominating the market for decades and in turn using anticompetitive laws to their advantage. IPA is a reaction against that flavor profile. You'll be starting to see new f…

Why not flavor with malts? I haven't looked into the history of American beer, but many styles seem to come from the price of local ingredients and qualities of local water. That makes me things hops were cheap and plentiful and caused the IPA trend.

Hoppiness is partly a reaction to the variance in hops and a pride in "American beer". Cascade hops in particular are cheap, available, and have a strong and distinctive flavor; hence the popularity of IPAs on the west coast, and the presence of companies like Sierra Nevada in the hoppy vanguard.

Even as the Cascade trend has diminished, lots of people have 'reacted' by rediscovering other hop flavors and advertising things like Nobel hopped beers.

Having said that, it's all getting a bit played out (except on the west coast, perhaps) and I'm starting to see more experimentation with other stylings like wheat, fruit tones, and dark ales.

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