You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end. If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.
I'm happily coding at 51.
Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
131–140 of 391 posts
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#132Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements. In other words, "having experience in the industry". Or "domain-specific knowledge" Back in the day, there were different industries to have experience in. Jet engines, medical devices, etc. Beyond that, nothing had/needed/understood software. For better or worse, it was a pinnacle. These days "the industry" is "teens using snapchat". The further you a…
I kept looking for the /s tag but couldn't see it. > Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements. Certainly a great deal of what you pay for in a more senior engineer is that ability to see around corners. I disagree entirely with your assessment that this ability is anything narrower than domain-specific (i.e. it extends only so far as 'an experienced software engineer' not so far as 'an experie…
> Why? What evidence supports this conclusion?
Because in the deluge of this style of post on HN lately, the most common counter has been "well we elders know the game so much better". Sounds exactly like sports. Yes you can pick up new skills and what-not, but "the game" has changed and the kids at a very fundamental level "get it" and you don't.
> having read The 100 Year Life
Okay....
> it's clear to me that in 20 years our job market will be different to the one we see today. Salary will likely be heavily decoupled from age and closely linked to merit.
Exactly. But merit at what? Old-school coders are the best there are. But they're getting kicked out because they're the best at stuff that nobody cares about. You know, algorithms and correct coding and what-not.
Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company. It's already happening / happened. There's no point to your book. If you "get" the latest social media craze and can figure out the best way to incorporate it, you're way more valuable than someone who knows 100 programming languages, wrote ten, and can solve the entirety of Project Euler in an hour.
Okay maybe the Euler guy might be worth something. (the /s you're wanting). But, given most of us, even if we're above average, aren't that guy, what does that leave? It leaves an NFL-style career. At 1/100 the salary.
Anyway I have two kids. I love programming. I'm good at it. I'm 40. I will steer them away from that as a profession. It's an NFL-style career.
Addendum:
> Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company. It's already happening / happened.
And don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. I guess. Anyway, fits in with the ideal of social Darwinism, and capitalism in general. Which, I guess is as good a thing as any, and likely unavoidable regardless. Nonetheless, it has to be taken for what it is, which is a pretty awesome career thru your early 30's followed by a never-ending gray cloud. Which is great if that's what you want. However if you're expecting a long-term career like I'd assume most are, you really need to plan out your career path in more detail. Most people going into CS don't recognize that, and it really needs to be made more plain.
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to be miserable and ineffective, you can be. All you have to do is set your mind to it. ...and you're doing a great job so far!
mhurron has a valid point and it is worth considering beyond him//her "doing a great job so far" being "miserable and ineffective".
I downvoted mhurron, I found it a fatalistic response that isn't constructive or helpful. Even if you feel you don't know anyone, you have to put effort in to meeting people. Here's three ways I got remote work before I knew anyone:
* I emailed a band I liked whose song was featured as Demo Of The Month in a magazine, asking to buy all their CDs. We kept in touch, and months later they asked me for some (free) advice about setting up their website. Later again, one of their friends was looking to hire someone & they recommended me - I worked remotely for them for 10 years.
* I wrote a script in PHP and made both a free version & a paid version, then mentioned it on a forum. I got a handful of sales, but one of those customers liked the code quality so much they asked if they could hire me for contract work. That work was done remotely too.
* I went to a blogger conference overseas & before I went I made a Twitter list of all the attendees, read their tweets and made online friends with a few who I found interesting. I met some of them at the conference, and one of them I kept in touch with for a year after the conference. We grabbed some coffee when they visited my city, I mentioned I was having a slow work period, they mentioned they needed someone technical, and we worked together for a couple of years. Again, mostly remote work (though I did fly to their offices every few months).
Instead of being negative, plant the seeds now. Start making friends, keep those friendships alive, keep letting people know what you do, keep creating proof that you're good at what you do (even if it's your own projects). It's a long process and it still won't guarantee you work, but it will give you a much better chance of offers coming your way. That's what worked for me anyway.
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#134I worked at Microsoft Redmond in 2009. They have a private uber like transport system. Around once a week the driver would hand me their resume and ask that I pass it on to my manager. It turns out that many of them had worked in the industry and were trying to get back in. They had a lot of experience and big important job titles etc. Mostly from the 2001 tech boom. That was my wake up call. If I'm not careful somed…
> you get left out of company politics
And if you work 80 hours a week, you get paid 2x as much.
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#135The sad part is that when you reach that age (31 here) is you start looking at the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecesary and the "new devs" that doesn't have any experience on making and maintaining long term projects (> 5 years) look at this as the holy grail technology and if you aren't using that technlogy it means you aren't as efficent as the "new guys" so you either migrate to management (whi…
http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/Angular-JS That's a pretty big chunk of the internet for a "new trend". My boss is in his 50s and he was the one who started us using node. Every month without fail, he repeats the words of his manager in the 90s: "Java is a fad. We'll all be using c++ again in a year". Don't be that guy.
Not too sure of the numbers on that site. It says AngularJS runs 1.5% of the Internet - 435,718 of 363,398,504 sites, but I thought that we are now over 1 billion websites according to some stats. Another Stat said about 890 million active sites.
Although 435K is nothing to sniff at, wordpress runs over 15 million sites.
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi I'm 32. I noticed some candidates show visible displeasure when being interviewed by younger interviewers. I know many interviewees and interviewers who have experienced this.
At 34, I interviewed at $BIG_SV_CO with two late 20s engineers. Not a huge age gap. In the discussion portion of the interview I asked if they were on xbox, ps4, battle.net, etc -- because I like to game occasionally in my spare time. They seemed almost offput by the question, as if they thought I was trying to force commonality or making assumptions about them. I dunno, it was weird.
I notice sometimes I get a little offput when people start off a videogame conversation by asking me what network I'm on. It just sounds/feels a little weird, depending on how it is phrased.
It feels more natural if it progresses through asking what games I've played
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#137I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discri…
San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away. - The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second s…
> "You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks"
This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#138I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discri…
Working in SV, quite honestly the best member of my team is >40 (I'm in my late 20's). I don't understand ageism at all, experience really makes the job easier and I value that wealth of knowledge as a more junior dev
The best team composition is an age of ranges, spanning 20 years- eg: early twenties to late 40s. (I wouldn't turn down an engineer older than that though, of course). And ranges of experiences. You need diversity to refine the ideas before committing them to code. Often the younger guys are faster at producing features, but produce lower quality code while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it. Both is a good combo.
I think a lot of the startup failures of really early stage startups might be due to the entire team being exactly the same age and right out of college. So they make mistakes that have been made many times before. Put another way there are many mistakes that can kill you and the more experience you have on your team the better you are at identifying them-- but you have to have innovation and new ideas too.
Which is not to say that any of these sets of characteristics are exclusive to a specific age -- this is just generalizations.
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away. - The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second s…
> "You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks" This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.
I just took the TripleByte assessment for Mixpanel and over half of it was this kind of shit. Worse, they threw in multiple-choice design questions. No, I would not use any of the complicated sets of things you presented me in this case, and do not think any of them is the right answer.
Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's not. I have no problem with someone making a job site for older folks. My problem is when that site is accompanied by an attitude of old developers being better . Likewise, I would absolutely object to a job site for black people marketing itself by disparaging white people: "give tech companies your white and naive to burn them out and make them piles of cash."
We old developers _are_ better. I, for one, have a lush neck beard and am seriously contemplating going with the sandals with socks look.
I delight my coworkers with dad jokes.