Interesting idea, and I see age discrimination at my tech company every day, but I think the name is pretty lame and I can see it probably exacerbating the issue.
Not Just Any Old Geek
131–140 of 305 posts
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#132As a programmer in my 60s, my (rather obvious) advice is to save and invest throughout your career so you have financial flexibility as you get older. I still very much enjoy working but when I have unbooked time I really enjoy that also. It also helps to have great hobbies. I enjoy writing (I am finishing up a Haskell book, and I have a partially written book on cognitive science that will get finished some day), I…
Awesome. Golden advice.
We need role models to make this a fulfilling career in the long run too.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#133This is an AWESOME idea and I totally appreciate both Tim's original article on the subject and your efforts on this job site. As a CTO I have long appreciated real world knowledge and experience over inexperienced, cheap, eagerness. Our employee's are all 30+, most have families and I believe that leads to well balanced and focused employee's. That is not to say I would not hire a younger employee but with age comes…
> As more and more dev's go grey the problem will resolve itself.
The problem with that is the rate at which young devs leave the industry before they turn grey. Some go into management, some go into business for themselves, some burn out completely, but I'm betting most won't be able to compete at the higher levels and will get squeezed out.
As those devs at the bottom age up and are expected to move up into more technically complicated senior roles, they'll find themselves overqualified for the roles they've gotten good at (building product features using framework X) and underqualified for the more technically complicated roles (designing compression algorithms, for example).
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
This is one thing that really worries me. I'm in my early 30s, and I'm perfectly content working a mid-level position. I've seen people my age pass me by several times, and I'm fine with that. I'm not good enough to keep up with the really good engineers, and it's probably going to be a long time before I have 'Senior' in my title, if ever.
When I'm in my 50s, I'm just not going to be one of those awesome elder coders. My boss is one of those graybeards, and he's awesome, but I'll never be him. I also have less than zero desire to ever work in management (and even if I wanted to do that, I don't have the people skills for it). So I'm seriously worried that I'm going to be unemployable in 10-20 years because companies will all prefer to hire people in their 20s with equivalent skills to mine out of ageism.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
>(still must admit that 37 doesn't feel old to me) Same; I find it a bit terrifying that 35+ is considered 'old' in our industry...
It's not, but he has to call himself old to give his business idea credibility. (which I think is fair, by the way)
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Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#136Earlier 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…
If the parent is sarcasm, please disregard my reply. > The stuff you did in software 20 years ago has absolutely nothing to do with the stuff that's being done today. Not even remotely true. Most of computer science is built on the past and either composed into something new upon a previous foundation, or a poor re-implementation of an already existing idea. A trendy favorite of many at the moment, Go lang is a good…
Like I've said the stuff that hasn't changed much is the CS, the actual engineering part has nothing to do with what we do today. 20 years ago the net was nowhere nearly as ubiquitous, hardware was incomparably slow, the bottlenecks were different - the focus shifted from single computer/mainframes/shared memory models -> distributed computing.
When I say copy paste in visual basic I'm talking about professional programmers that couldn't even abstract stuff in to functions but would copy paste shit all over the code - not copy-pasting from other sources.
As much as people like to bitch about our industry we have heavily increased engineering standard, if you don't use source control these days you get laughed at, if you don't use automated testing you're an amateur, even junior programmers know about patterns and nobody copy-pastes code over their code base - stuff like this was the exception back then not the norm as it is now. You can say MVC was invented in the 80s or w/e but up until maybe 10 years ago the internet was full of tutorials/guides on how to do web coding by interpolating PHP inside of your HTML, using string concatenation to build SQL queries and such nonsense. Sure top 10% never did that but the vast majority of programmers did and the broader industry has improved significantly since then, in no small part thanks to the frameworks that constrain the bad developers on to the "good path".
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Right - I took the comment to be about working sane hours yields better results than working twice as long... and generally older folks are less inclined to work the 2x hours.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#138Earlier 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…
I've been programming in functional languages for twelve years and recognizably modern C++ for fifteen at this point. And yet, I'm not a graybeard; I'm 28. But what I learned at that point still informs what I do today. And it's why I respect that those graybeards' old work still has impact today.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#139Earlier 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…
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.
The stuff you learned in your CS course is still just as relevant as it was 20 years ago. The things you did in your development career are nowhere near so.
Did you use SCM, automated testing and design patterns 20 years ago ? If yes do you think this was the norm in the industry ?
I'm not saying those things are the only relevant things, I'm just pointing out the obvious examples of how much things have changed since then. I've said in another comment, we've moved from mainframe/single PC shared memory model in to distributed/cloud/networked computing in the last 20 years and the problems from that era are completely different to problems today. Even on the low-level end the basic design constraints such as the difference between CPU instruction speed/memory access/cache miss dramatically changed what it means to write optimized code, nobody these days rolls their own SQRT function to squeeze out a few extra CPU cycles, now days it's about making sure your memory is laid out so that you get as few cache misses as possible.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#140Nice site but it's very US-centric. Opportunities are available all around the world, why limit to only US states/cities (I have a whole bunch of jobs in Amsterdam that I could share if only it was possible!)