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Not Just Any Old Geek

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171–180 of 305 posts

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#171
post #149

If you want long career in programming you should really do serious career planing during your 20s to make sure you check all important boxes: correct technologies, mix of different kind of companies, team sizes and roles. Otherwise you might get into complicated position down the road. I am in the early 30s and on top of my ability, but I don't see my future too bright from here. 10 years ago I make decision to do f…

"correct technologies". hah, good luck. if any of us had a crystal ball we would be billionaires, not still coding.

It is very simple if you want to be employable person, just stick to trendiest and coolest stuff and switch when there is market demand for new tech. For past decade thats like Java/PHP -> Rails -> Objective C -> Node.js (or whatever).

The point was that you should plan in advance if you want to be employeable and make sure to not stick in dead-end job/project. If your last ten years were spent writing ActionScript for unknown company, then good luck finding new job.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#172

I'm pushing 40 and am starting to measure my productivity by how much code I remove in a day, not how much I write. Is anyone else feeling that way? That much of what we do is a waste of time, that perhaps software is evolving in wrong directions due to issues like income inequality (wealth and expertise being at opposite ends of the spectrum) or worse is better? Sometimes I stare at the ceiling realizing that the en…

I feel very similar at times. I don't mind re-inventing the wheel if it's a much faster wheel, but typically... they hit the same pitfalls that the first wheel-builders hit.

I do love my job, but I also don't want to move to the next new, hot framework because it's new and hot. I keep wondering if this is what burnout feels like, but then when I get home and I can work on any project I want, I find that there is so much cool stuff to learn that I get excited.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 The tech is 10 years out of date, but it's so ingrained in the customer sites that it's going to stay there.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.

And then the consultants leave, and the experienced developers have to fix the crummy bug-ridden code they leave behind. :)

As an older developer, I think one advantage I do actually have is that I do know legacy technology. You don't want to become a developer that only knows that, but as long as I reasonably keep up with current technology and don't become a Grumpy Old Back In My Day type of old developer, that should add, not subtract. At my current job, there are actually some VB6 apps still in operation, so sometimes I am actually pulling up VB6 apps to fix or enhance to go along with the shiny new Angular 2 apps we're working on.

Yes I know that I don't have the energy to pursue the move-fast-break-things life of startup style companies, but not every company is like that.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

> Did you use SCM, automated testing and design patterns 20 years ago ? If yes do you think this was the norm in the industry ?

Design patterns are way older than 20 years... hell, the design pattern bible was published 22 years ago, which means design patterns were in wide circulation well before I could tie shoes. According to wikipedia CVS has been around for 26 years.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#175
post #85
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…

>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?

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/12/22/37250839...

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

I was in high school and didn't know the first thing about programming 20 years ago. But it seems to me that "design patterns," SCM, and automated testing aren't the hard part of this discipline.

Sure they are. They are the "hard part" of what every 9-5 LOB dev has to do, and even in the more CS heavy fields from my experience the algorithms and the fancy CS is 20% of the work and the rest is implementing mundane details, bug fixing, testing, cooperating with team members, etc. And that's the stuff that improved since the 90s.

Delivering reliable software is hard - but we've gotten a lot better at it in the last 20 years, if you don't believe me boot up some old windows 95/98 image install some random software and see for yourself.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

> Did you use SCM, automated testing and design patterns 20 years ago ? If yes do you think this was the norm in the industry ? Design patterns are way older than 20 years... hell, the design pattern bible was published 22 years ago, which means design patterns were in wide circulation well before I could tie shoes. According to wikipedia CVS has been around for 26 years.

Again - I'm not saying these things didn't exist - I'm saying they weren't the norm in the industry.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#178
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think your stream will dry out? Why wouldn't you be still doing this 10-20 years from now?

Who knows, my main income streams are developing Delphi 5 applications (dead market), iPhone apps (market is changing and I see much less new gigs for solo developers) and Rails apps. Low hanging fruits seems to be picked and each new app needs to be much better, which require bigger teams.

You should definitely invest in your skill set then, and learn new technologies if you want to stay in the game - but age is not the critical factor here. Perhaps you've lost your passion?

I'm about a decade older than you and I'm still continuously working on evolving my skills and learning new languages and technologies. I do it primarily because it excites me, and as an added bonus it keeps me ahead in the game :)

Actually, the career path of a consultant is from I'm seeing around me, a very solid path for older guys who love programming. I know a couple of 50+ year old guys who still get tons of work, and it seems like since they are consultants, no one cares about their "cultural fit" etc.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prog…

We don't really have many true standards, just pockets of consensus on best practices and collections of so-called standards that are quite often ignored. Thanks to better communication, I think it's safe to agree that these practices are more widespread. As a result, yes, quality for certain groups has definitely increased.

I think you underestimate the fact that a large number of people actually do not follow these practices, even those that know better. Further, it's hard to make statements about software quality, especially with so many moving variables like the increase in the total amount of people in the industry and lower barriers to entry. Regarding best practices, I am sure many people have stories about asking questions in interviews about a company's software development, only to be told, "Well we'd love to do X, but we just don't have the resources or time, so we do Y." Even people who know better do otherwise in addition to those that are ignorant.

I think at a conceptual level, many things have not changed. There have always been sets of new ideas and practices that people adopted, many times blindly. These are of course a mixed bag, but many so-called "best practices" are often abandoned later - fads are the norm, and while that's sometimes OK, it does not always result in "better" as much as "different." I think some people fail to realize that in the moment, it's all happened before, and all will happen again. We both learn from our past mistakes with new trends and repeat those mistakes.

MVC and frameworks are actually interesting examples. I don't want to get too into individual tech discussions, but I've personally seen people handcuff themselves trying to religiously implement things such as MVC and actually failing because of a pattern like that since they were distracted from solving the problems properly. Adopting a pattern or framework does not automatically produce better code and can even lead you the opposite way. It's hard to say if things like this are a win for all so much as if they are simply a good fit for certain problems, and therein lies the challenge and one that hasn't become easier. The golden hammer or wrong tool will forever be problems.

Frameworks often are oversold and are not standards. In fact I've found that for many projects I have actually had to abandon a particular framework long-term because it was just getting in the way for various reasons - performance, maintainability, velocity of change, conceptual failings, zealotry, etc. Frameworks can derail "bad" developers as you call them just as much as good ones. Frameworks often explode if you don't do things the "one true way" and "bad" developers can be argued to be prone to that just as much as everyone else, and simply adhering to these rules still doesn't always produce better software. There have always been frameworks in one shape or form, but they didn't always have names, sometimes they were just the language or tool imposing its constraints, sometimes for the best, sometimes the worst. As a counterpoint, I've actually found working in various languages like Clojure, Lisp, and Racket that tend to value composition of tools and functions over frameworks more productive, however I would never apply this to all projects and situations.

I see what you're getting overall at and on some level I agree. I was around in the 80s, and I don't want to go back to that. At the same time, for all the old problems solved, I see new ones that arise along with other things that were never problems coming to haunt us. It sounds like your experience is very compartmentalized to web development and you're projecting those views on to both the past and present. People are people, and no time, technologies, or tools will fix that, just deal you different cards.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#180
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…

For me, what works is "productivity sniping": it's not about work rate, however you might want to quantify it, but about occasionally encountering problems that others find intractable and making them go away. In this case having a set of old experiences actually helps, as I can handle things that new graduates haven't seen.

I half-seriously call it "full stack from the transistor up".

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