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Not Just Any Old Geek

blog.oldgeekjobs.com

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Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#91

Post by sharemywin »

witty_username wrote: post #88
czep wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? If you were wrongly convicted and awaiting a death sentence, would you pick a 22 year old attorney fresh from law school to defend you? If you have a field full of tomatoes that needs picking, do you save a few dollars…

> If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? Rationally one would care about the outcomes, and the number of times would merely make us more certain about the outcome. Relative to the two scenarios you showed, programming is usually more like tomato picking—nob…

self driving cars.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#92

Post by rubber_duck »

czep wrote: post #85
uola wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, even as I'm getting older, this isn't at all obvious to me. Someone with five years solid experience with web development might very well be far more effective than someone with twenty years experience of working in corners of large companies with various technologies, especially when you consider the expected salary. I think it good that people are talking about these things, but sometime it seem like peop…

If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? If you were wrongly convicted and awaiting a death sentence, would you pick a 22 year old attorney fresh from law school to defend you? If you have a field full of tomatoes that needs picking, do you save a few dollars…

Umm the more comparable parable would be "or the proverbial graybeard who has done ~~it~~ kidney surgery a thousand times"

The stuff you did in software 20 years ago has absolutely nothing to do with the stuff that's being done today. Like holly shit most people weren't even using source control back, unit testing and automated testing in general was SciFi, it was done by QA departments if you were big enough to do it.

People were writing C and the major problems of the industry were how to fit shit in to x MB of ram and x CPU cycles.

Security was abysmal - you didn't even have process isolation on OS-es.

The languages and the practices are also completely different - disregarding the "we did it in the 60s with LISP in this paper" crowd - outside of academia people were just getting in to the OOP which was the pinnacle of abstractions back then.

This is the drag&drop and copy-paste as an abstraction VB shit era.

Unless you were at one of the cutting edge places that were actually innovating back then in terms of process and stuff there's likely nothing from that skill set that transfers on to the problems that we are dealing with today beyond the CS grad basics.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#93

Post by ojbyrne »

witty_username wrote: post #88
czep wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? If you were wrongly convicted and awaiting a death sentence, would you pick a 22 year old attorney fresh from law school to defend you? If you have a field full of tomatoes that needs picking, do you save a few dollars…

> If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? Rationally one would care about the outcomes, and the number of times would merely make us more certain about the outcome. Relative to the two scenarios you showed, programming is usually more like tomato picking—nob…

Perhaps most of the time that's true, I suspect that a lot of health care is the same. There have been plenty of instances of software bugs killing or injuring people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#94

Post by DeltaWhy »

EliRivers wrote: post #38
headmelted wrote: post #34

I actually love this. I've never worked in the valley, and honestly I feel no pressing urge to based on what I hear with regards to the bias in favour of twenty-somethings who can work 15+ hour days and live off of ramen. I'm pushing into my mid-thirties this year, I'm married with two young children, and I simply can't work the kind of hours that I could ten years ago. The thing is, I didn't do it then either, even…

I simply can't work the kind of hours that I could ten years ago. I find this is true in two ways; not only do I have better things to do now than donate free overtime to my employer, I am far better at not needing to. My best work in recent memory involved reading and thinking and sketching for a day and a half, and then adding six characters and a space to the front of one line of code; a decade ago, there is a rea…

What were the six characters?

Reminds me of the old joke/parable about the mechanic charging $1 for turning a screw and $499 for knowing which screw to turn.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#95

Post by philbarr »

dfsegoat wrote: post #58
daemonk wrote: post #15

I am getting to old geek status myself. From a more cynical perspective, I am not sure if we can compete with early twenty-somethings who are unjaded and buy into the silicon valley mystique. They are willing to work 12 hour days and still do the faux-japanese salarymen afterwork socializing that supposedly builds "culture". Older geeks don't buy into this ping-pong table propaganda. Tech companies probably won't be…

To share me / and things that keep me up at night: I am an old geek - (34 now - i guess)... I still need to work the 12 hour days in order to keep up with my day job AND to keep up with new technologies and the literature via Pluralsight, Github / HN / Coursera etc. This is what I really worry about in terms of my health and longevity: Being able to "stay on top" of the latest trends and shiney new things - and decid…

This is why, at age 38, I deliberately chose to move to big-tech-company-x. As it turns out, most of my colleagues are older than me and starting to look towards their pensions.

The tech is 10 years out of date, but it's so ingrained in the customer sites that it's going to stay there. There are plenty of jobs like this out there in finance, public institutions (or big companies serving them), the military (military projects can go on for decades) and so on. I get job security and a decent pension building up, they get an experienced developer in return.

And in the meantime I can choose to look at shiny-new-thing without having to worry my career might depend on it.

People might think 38 is a bit early to "sell out", but our industry is definitely ageist. It's not easy for non-techs to see the difference between an experienced dev who wants £100k that knows technology x and a graduate who wants £fuck-all and knows technology x.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#96

Post by other_herbert »

amcrouch wrote: post #86
peterbonney wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually think that the ageism in tech is a result of it being a young industry. As more and more dev's go grey the problem will resolve itself. Tell that to devs who worked in the dotcom boom, or the PC boom before that.

Perhaps then the issue is that all developers see a path to management as the only way to progress their career and in actual fact there is only a minority of developers who love their job enough to want to do it for their entire career?

I think this is true of a lot of devs... I have seen friends who who have gone into management because they didn't really love coding.. I've been doing this stuff since I was 9 and don't ever want to stop

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#97

Post by omginternets »

czep wrote: post #85
uola wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, even as I'm getting older, this isn't at all obvious to me. Someone with five years solid experience with web development might very well be far more effective than someone with twenty years experience of working in corners of large companies with various technologies, especially when you consider the expected salary. I think it good that people are talking about these things, but sometime it seem like peop…

If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? If you were wrongly convicted and awaiting a death sentence, would you pick a 22 year old attorney fresh from law school to defend you? If you have a field full of tomatoes that needs picking, do you save a few dollars…

>So are we law and medicine or are we tomato pickers?

There's engineering and engineering. Making apps using electron.js and writing high-frequency trading software isn't the same gig. I think much of the problem described by the parent comment falls upon those programmers doing the former.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#99

Post by samfisher83 »

daemonk wrote: post #15

I am getting to old geek status myself. From a more cynical perspective, I am not sure if we can compete with early twenty-somethings who are unjaded and buy into the silicon valley mystique. They are willing to work 12 hour days and still do the faux-japanese salarymen afterwork socializing that supposedly builds "culture". Older geeks don't buy into this ping-pong table propaganda. Tech companies probably won't be…

The valley pays a lot so if you want to get in that club you have to play that game.The investors don't care about your family. They are interested in making money to feed their family. They found a formula and I don't think they are going to change it. Look at the Big 4: MSFT, APPL, AMNZ, FB. All their founders were on the right side of 30 except maybe bezos.

It is kind of troubling the age that you are getting old seems to keep getting lower. Now 30 is old. In the future it might be 27. Node was only made like 6-7 years ago and it seems to be one of the most popular "Languages" out there.

Based on my experience well thought out designs are not so admired even though people say it is. It seems like the "mantra" is just get something out of the door and we will iterate on it.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#100

Post by mathattack »

My 2 cents...

1 - The key to avoiding age discrimination is looking for a boss your age or older. Nothing stops the applicant from pre-selecting companies this way. This is also true if you have kids.

2 - There's less age discrimination ("cultural fit") in the Peninsula than SF because execs are more likely to have families.

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