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

191–200 of 305 posts

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#191

Post by coldtea »

rubber_duck wrote: post #181
coldtea wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That stuff a competent graybeard knows already. You don't think they disappeared in 1990 and re-appeared magically tod…

I mean if you were a good dev in the 90s chances are right now you're in some senior architect/management/consultant position. If you're competing for the same jobs as 20 something devs then you've probably screwed up somewhere in your career. I started programming in late 90s but not professionally until 2006 I think, this was probably the late phase of transition to internet as a dominant factor in computing - so I…

>I mean if you were a good dev in the 90s chances are right now you're in some senior architect/management/consultant position. If you're competing for the same jobs as 20 something devs then you've probably screwed up somewhere in your career.

Or you just don't like management / like programming?

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#192

Post by crdoconnor »

bitwize wrote: post #168
crdoconnor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. This is a myth. It doesn't count for that much. Programmer productivity cannot be effectively measured even by other programmers and certainly can't be measured by non-technical managers. The fact that you are doing something can be easily verified. The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed a…

If you are correctly following an Agile process such as Scrum, the productivity of each team member can indeed be quantified. You may think it's pure bullshit numbers, but the ratio of story points to hours worked tends to stabilize over time and give management an idea of how productive you really are.

Absolute bullshit.

* A team that is being judged on scrum velocity can simply keep inflating story points to make it look like they're going faster.

* A team that is optimistic has a lower velocity. A team that is pessimistic has a higher velocity.

* If a story is 8 points that gives no clue as to whether it ought to be a 2 point (if the technical debt accrued by the team were not so high).

In practice I've found that it doesn't stabilize either. Of course that automatically means you just "weren't doing Scrum properly".

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#193

Post by crdoconnor »

ChoHag wrote: post #153
crdoconnor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. This is a myth. It doesn't count for that much. Programmer productivity cannot be effectively measured even by other programmers and certainly can't be measured by non-technical managers. The fact that you are doing something can be easily verified. The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed a…

> The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed and quality cannot. Well it can, but not in a way we necessarily like - it's called the marketplace.

It's called a market for lemons.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#194

Post by jimbokun »

curun1r wrote: post #83
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…

I came to this realization a few years ago. I found that while my judgment was still improving, my output wasn't and my ability to think through problems wasn't where it used to be, especially when it came to the tiny details. So I moved into management. It allowed me leverage my strengths while putting me in a situation where my value wasn't determined by my raw output. It sucks going to all those meetings, but it h…

How does a programmer go about moving into management?

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#195

Post by Futurebot »

I'm glad someone created this service and I hope it succeeds and sticks around. Since it won't/can't fix everything, here are my suggestions for dealing with ageism in technology:

1) Try to make your fortune early. Most won’t, but try anyway. Better to have given it a shot in your twenties/thirties/maybe forties, than to sit around at 56 wondering what you’re going to do with yourself.

2) Never stop learning. Everyone has to become lifelong learners in this new hyper-competitive economy. Even moreso for those with traditional “disadvantages” like being considered too old. Keep up with trends, keep reading those whitepapers, go back and review the basics every so often (this is a good idea anyway, IMO), learn at least the basics of the new whiz-bang thing that comes out (even if it’s just the “hello world” equivalent), and generally keep yourself “interview ready.”

3) Physical appearance matters. They may not be able to ask your age, but they can look at you, and they’ll form an opinion either consciously or subconsciously; though many find this incredibly distasteful, it is the reality. That means consider carefully whether smoking/alcohol/other intoxicants that affect your physical appearance are worth it. It behooves you to keep a regular exercise schedule. Cosmetic surgery is also an option; there are many tells for age you can fix: eyelid and eyebrow droop, under-eye and various other facial lines, hanging chin. Hair dye and grafts are also worth considering, as a receded hairline and whites/grays are obvious tells.

4) It probably goes without saying to keep up your professional network.

5) Another distasteful one, but perhaps worth thinking about: if you’re someone who is in the age bracket that is often considered “very likely to have a family,” but you don’t (especially if you don’t ever plan to), state it. Signaling that you don’t have large, difficult-to-discharge obligations could give you the edge you need; you might get mentally re-bracketed. I haven’t tried this one, since I’m not yet in the bracket nor do I appear to be, but I would probably do so if I were.

6) Companies that are truly hard up for good people (and not just the “we can’t hire (at the wage we wish to pay)” companies) will just have to be more flexible. Maybe they already are.

Until we can fix the social / economic issues that underlie (some parts of) ageism, the above might help someone dealing with it on the ground.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#196

Post by ryandrake »

bshimmin wrote: post #119
clockwerx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Love it--Thanks for the last line there. I'm glad I didn't have any food in my mouth while reading this because it'd be all over the screen right now.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#197

Post by BatFastard »

If I had a few millions under my belt, I would start a company that only employs empty nesters. Kids are out of the house usually. So you have a lot more free time.

You have great experience, you know how to work with people, you know how to get things done, you have probably worked in 40 different techs.

If you are writing software at this age you do it for love, not for money. I love to create, and software leads to the least cuts, burns, and pulled muscles of any career or hobby I have pursued!

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#198

Post by js8 »

rubber_duck wrote: post #139
emodendroket wrote: post #113

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 ?

SCM was the norm, at least in certain circles, maybe you should read up on stuff as:

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

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

Now of course, many PC developers came from 8-bit computers rather than mainframes, where SCM didn't really mattered, because programs were very small.

Automated testing - well, I have seen Lisp compiler written in the 80s that had them. So where it made sense and was possible to do, I think people did it. (IMHO it only makes sense for programs or their parts that are written in purely functional style, which is not a big chunk.) The workflow was different in the past (big emphasis on integration and system testing) and I wouldn't say it was necessarily worse.

Design patterns definitely existed, but they weren't named as such.

I am not even sure if people (writing business applications) are more productive today. We have lot of new artificial requirements. In the past, it was typical for datatypes and other things to be constrained by design. Today, people are unwilling to do that, even though it wouldn't change anything from the business perspective.

Or take a look at web. It's a tangled mess of HTML, CSS and JS (it's been 20 years and people still can't agree whether or not is a good idea to produce HTML in JS!). In the past, you would use something like CICS or VB or Delphi, which is a consistent framework, written for the purpose of building interactive business application.

> 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

Not really. The tradeoffs are simple to understand for somebody who had CS course 20, or even 40 years ago. And even back then people writing applications didn't hand roll their own SQRT, even back then frameworks and libraries did that for you.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#199

Post by atoko »

jimbokun wrote: post #189
rubber_duck wrote: post #139

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…

"nobody these days rolls their own SQRT function to squeeze out a few extra CPU cycles" Um, nobody did this 20 years ago, either.

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

Not exactly SQRT, but.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#200

Post by pavlov »

A particularly strange thing about SV ageism is that some of the same people who think a 40-year-old is useless also hope to live forever. (Singularity, longevity breakthroughs, whatever.)

What do they expect to be doing at 1000 years old?

The explanation that springs to mind is that young techies lured by longevity expect to be part of "the only generation". Anyone older is too out of touch, and younger generations basically won't happen as immortals can't have kids nilly-willy. So the world would be eternally ruled by a cabal of geriatric techies born around 1990. Now that's a dystopic thought!

Post reply on HN