Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Not Just Any Old Geek

blog.oldgeekjobs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 305 posts

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#111

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Churning out code usually isn't engineering, and it isn't tomato picking. It's more like being a machinist in an industrial setting. You need to know the tools and how to read the spec. That's why you can post a technology position, get 1,000 resumes from people working professionally, and find that 80% of the candidates lack basic knowledge.

The problem is that if you don't up your game to be in a more engineering-y role, you're just one ROI calculation away from being automated out of existence.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#112

Post by pc86 »

jwr wrote: post #30
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…

I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. Inexperienced young programmers working 2x the hours do not necessarily produce Output That Works (I know, I've been one myself). Sure, not every company will realize that, but then again, you don't necessarily want to work for every ping-pong table company, either. Cultural fit and all that.

Ignoring the Very Smart Capitalization, I haven't seen any correlation between age and {skill, productivity, intelligence, results}.

I've worked with very smart, cutting-edge literal graybeards who could code circles around me, and guys who have been at the same company in the same entry-level or mid-level programming job for 25 years yelling in a meeting about "this damn web shit."

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#113

Post by emodendroket »

rubber_duck wrote: post #92
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…

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 i…

Most programs don't really use algorithms or data structures that were discovered much later than the '70s. This idea that old experience is worthless because we're using different libraries now strikes me as altogether wrongheaded.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#114

Post by emodendroket »

daemonk wrote: post #29
drvdevd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been into programming most of my life, but actually didn't get started professionally until my mid-to-late 20s. This gave me a unique view of said propaganda. It certainly lives everywhere including outside SV. I've been able to quickly recognize it being applied and thus desire other, better forms of compensation. I think this is a skill we should strive to teach younger programmers, because if properly applied…

Yeah definitely. I actually work in academia (I guess I wasn't very qualified to speak about SV). But it's the same shtick everywhere. Passion has become an euphemism for soft corporate brain-washing. I am reminded of this blog article by an ad executive before his death where he raised similar points about his industry: http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-p...

I always like to think of passion in the classical meaning (like "the passion of Christ") when I read crap about being passionate at work.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#115

Post by treehau5 »

philbarr wrote: post #95
dfsegoat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Until that one consultant moves in, and convinces someone higher up that you need to move to microservices and containerize all the things, and next thing you know, you are all growing mustaches, wearing suspenders and horn-rimmed glasses, taking Lyft's to work, and clamoring for the company to sponsor your Chemex habits.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#116

Post by emodendroket »

js8 wrote: post #48
drvdevd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been into programming most of my life, but actually didn't get started professionally until my mid-to-late 20s. This gave me a unique view of said propaganda. It certainly lives everywhere including outside SV. I've been able to quickly recognize it being applied and thus desire other, better forms of compensation. I think this is a skill we should strive to teach younger programmers, because if properly applied…

> Your time is valuable no matter how old you are I disagree, but maybe that would explain it, your time is actually more valuable (for you) as you grow older.

Really? You think your time is without value? What a strange position.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#117

Post by pc86 »

dexterdog wrote: post #79
njloof wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remember fixing a Y2K bug, you must be an old geek.

There are plenty of people who worked on Y2K bugs who are not even old enough to be a US President.

I mean that sounds neat but the math doesn't match up.

You have to be 35 to be President, so being generous let's take a 35 year old now, so they were born in 1982 give or take (2017-35).

They would have had to get a programming job right out of HS and even then best case it would have been halfway through 1999. More accurately, they likely didn't enter the workforce until 2004 or 2005.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#118

Post by amcrouch »

rubber_duck wrote: post #92
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…

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 i…

Hmmm ... disagree!

18 years ago we had much of what we had today. Things might move on but they do not change. I mean hey, everyone still hates Visual Basic!

At least 18 years ago we were actually writing the majority of our code rather than relying so heavily on libraries and third party code. I mean someone only has to pull a Node.js plugin for padding and there is complete melt down!

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#119

Post by bshimmin »

clockwerx wrote: post #109
rubber_duck wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Stuff that hasnt changed markedly: geometry math, statistics. SQL - 1970s. SOLID - parts of that are late 1980. C still looks like C. Unix like environments. Awk/sed/etc. Go read about the history of the web or XML; you get a very strong sense that these things have been thought about for a long time - data interchange has varied formats, but there is still a lot of tedious ETL type work. The importance of naming thi…

One thing I've found that's significantly changed since I began my career, before my beard went grey, is that projects are now in general run much better. People never make a total mess of estimating timings, and the Agile methodology (and Kanban boards, and Trello, and JIRA, and of course Slack) really fix all organisational and prioritisation problems such that projects never end in disaster; gone are the days of frantic last minute firefighting and all-nighters, as we desperately work out which features are critical to getting the project live before everything explodes. Clearly the experience of older, wiser heads in moments of crisis is now basically never required because projects run so smoothly.

Haha, sorry, I'm only kidding.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#120

Post by jkot »

Insanity wrote: post #69
jkot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consulting business is pretty low risk. I started my own business when my wife was pregnant. I found it much more family friendly than 9-5 cubicle job.

True that seems to be low-risk, and 9-5 cubicle might not be family friendly either. But I'm working for a company where I can choose my own hours to a certain degree (in between 8-12, leave after 8 hours with one hour break). So I can be home rather early. Plus work from home means that I can easily take care of making dinner etc. But I didn't consider a consulting business and actually I have no idea how your day l…

Location independence, 60% time without work...
Post reply on HN