I will be 63 in a few days. If 37+ makes you an old geek I must be ancient. At least I am employed.
If you remember fixing a Y2K bug, you must be an old geek.
Not Just Any Old Geek
71–80 of 305 posts
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#72I didn't feel this kind of bias here in Berlin. When founding FitAnalytics.com, we were three young students fresh from university, but all of us highly appreciated more senior programmers (40+) joining the team. Even if their language didn't fit our stack (C++ for a JS position), my experience was extremely positive, feeling that some programmers just get better with age, no matter the language du jour. Regarding pa…
It seems to me Berlin's startup ecosystem is heavily optimized for very young people. It's awesome the immigration process is so easy, but the minimum wage requirement for IT jobs is just 38,688 EUR. Lots of companies sponsoring visas, but with wages rarely above 50k EUR, even with a relatively low cost of living, they're only attracting young singles willing to sacrifice in order to get a blue card. And from the job pages videos I've seen (like Zalando), they explicitly state they're looking for young talent, and of course the ping-pong table propaganda (love that term!) is pretty standard.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#73(Not that it really matters, but I'm 27...) A few things came to me after reading the post: Firstly, how this situation shared by the OP and many others is pure insanity. That the very people who grew up with this technology during the baby years are now struggling to have a place now that it really has taken off. Secondly, for those in their mid-30's and onward, to realize how immensely skilled they likely are at wr…
I'm 41. Must make me ancient. :)
I completely agree with the OP. About 10 years ago I created a very focused professional blog to improve my writing even though I'd already written an O'Reilly book, just as an excuse to hone my skills.
I just created a blog series about building your own language in JS, just because I've always wanted to do it. There's definitely freedom that comes with age. (and goes away with small children)
https://www.pubnub.com/blog/2016-09-26-4-tutorials-create-la...
I've found that some good engineers find a role as developer evangelists, using both their technical and writing skills. Maybe check out DevRelCon.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#74It seems to me that, as others have suggested, this might be just a silicon valley bias, real or perceived. At 32, my skills in both hard and soft outstrip anything a developer in their early twenties could match, no matter how passionate or innately skilled they are. There is a certain 'momentum' you pick up as you get older, especially if you have been constantly feeding it with new experiences, learnings and failu…
I would say that in my late 30's I was hitting my peak in terms of raw ability and experience. At least as far as ability is concerned, I really didn't hit a downturn until much later. Now, getting on to 50, I'm noticing that my ability to deal with complexity is quite a bit diminished. But my tolerance for complexity is likewise diminished. When I would have accepted a poorly factored solution, now I scratch my head until I find a way that allows me to understand it.
When you get down to it, do you really want to tailor your code base to the top 1% of coders? How will you sustain that practice? By paying people 4 times as much? Even then you aren't going to nab all the amazing people. Hire some people who know how to dumb down your code base. It pays dividends.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#75> I’ve published a dozen articles ... build software with thousands of paying customers. ... work on open source Python. ... read almost 40 business books, and I live and breathe HackerNews. Why not start your own business or become CTO? Why work for someone less experienced?
Not everyone want's to be a CTO, I'm thinking about that but I would prefer to be a programmer. I'm only 32.
32 too. Recently I suddenly got CTO-like responsibilities and at first glance it was not what I wanted to do. There was fear whether employees will understand and do it right way. Otoh, I think it is what we actually should do -- merge our experience and vision into the team at high level, because it allows to build something bigger and greater than just yourself. As I read recently in some book, good leader doesn't control things, but provides correct context of thinking, allows others to participate in their way to the common goal. I missed these context constraints when I was young, so many efforts simply lost in unnecessary details.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#76I'd love to see this expanded to London, as someone who is fast approaching old geek status.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#77If Jaromir Jagr, at 44 years of age, can play at the highest level of professional hockey in the world, leading his young team in points (and 2nd in goals) last season [1] just imagine what a programmer can do with the same level of focus and determination at that age and beyond. [1] https://www.nhl.com/panthers/stats/regular-season/skaters/p
I have noticed a lot of pro downhill mountain bikers are around the same age as me - early 40's.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#78(Not that it really matters, but I'm 27...) A few things came to me after reading the post: Firstly, how this situation shared by the OP and many others is pure insanity. That the very people who grew up with this technology during the baby years are now struggling to have a place now that it really has taken off. Secondly, for those in their mid-30's and onward, to realize how immensely skilled they likely are at wr…
I'm starting to think that the way things worked is that older people realize that the best way to get ahead is to exploit younger inexperienced workers who don't yet know their own value and power, whether it's as employees or through being a landlord rentier. That doesn't work so well anymore when the young can build their own web business without any of the contacts and wisdom required before. My generation (x) ar…
And so is theirs since there is only so much space for successful businesses and so many of them fail. It's even worse because small, nimble companies can do the jobs of many companies now so you have to be even better to succeed and stay on top.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#79Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#80It seems to me that, as others have suggested, this might be just a silicon valley bias, real or perceived. At 32, my skills in both hard and soft outstrip anything a developer in their early twenties could match, no matter how passionate or innately skilled they are. There is a certain 'momentum' you pick up as you get older, especially if you have been constantly feeding it with new experiences, learnings and failu…
I would say that in my late 30's I was hitting my peak in terms of raw ability and experience. At least as far as ability is concerned, I really didn't hit a downturn until much later. Now, getting on to 50, I'm noticing that my ability to deal with complexity is quite a bit diminished. But my tolerance for complexity is likewise diminished. When I would have accepted a poorly factored solution, now I scratch my head…
Yup. The "we only hire the best" thought process is delusional and irrational.