Not Just Any Old Geek • Hacker News Board

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#251

Post by pfarnsworth » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

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…

If you were building a team to win the Super Bowl, would you pick the hot shot 23 year old fresh grad from college, or the 50 year old experienced Hall of Famer?

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#252

Post by bbarn » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #84

jwr wrote: post #30

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. 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.

> We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts It's harder for me to "get stuff done" when then "stuff" is bullshit. There are times when what's being asked for is wrong (stealing code/images/whatever), or a wrong solution to the problem. "Right/Wrong" can be subjective, so I shy away from making those snap judgements until I know more about why something is being asked for, but a…

I see that as a selling point to being more experienced. Intolerance for bullshit is a good trait in many a job.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#253

Post by coldtea » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #221

coldtea wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

My last two jobs I got hired for, I said while interviewing that it was my explicit career goal to never become a manager.

Yeah, I had some chances, but never liked the role of the pointy haired boss.

On the other hand, I don't like having to suffer stupid enterprise project managers either, though in my line of work it's better than the norm (more startup-y -- heck, we are at 100 people or so and our founder/boss still codes like crazy, same for the CTO).

I think the ideal for our kind of persons is having your own company -- either an one person one, or a bigger outfit but with someone else handling the marketing and finance parts. You get to both program and chose what and how to deliver.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#254

Post by coldtea » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #216

coldtea wrote: post #160

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 hiring, you would want the starry eyed, finger in the pulse of latest fads, young programmer you can pay less, overwork, boss around, and screw over, or the senior engineer, who values sane hours and time…

If that's what the hiring person is like, though, I'm fine with not getting that job...

As long as there are enough other good programming gigs available though...

As in, most McDonalds workers also hate both the hiring person AND the job, but they do it anyway.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#255

Post by tjl » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

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…

Back in 1996 I was using CVS at work. Before that it was RCS or SCCS (RCS was the first version control system I used). This was at Bell-Northern Research and Nortel, which was not a bastion of cutting edge techniques. ClearCase was pretty commonly used as well (it came out in 1992).

Automated testing wasn't science fiction. It was regularly done, just as system or integration tests. You'd see who did the commit that broke the build. This was before QA even got to do their work. This was something done across the company and I'm certain that it wasn't the only company that did this.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#256

Post by initram » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 6:06 PM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #74

AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #5

It seems to me that, as others have suggested, this might be just a silicon valley bias, real or perceived. At 32, my skills in both hard and soft outstrip anything a developer in their early twenties could match, no matter how passionate or innately skilled they are. There is a certain 'momentum' you pick up as you get older, especially if you have been constantly feeding it with new experiences, learnings and failu…

I would say that in my late 30's I was hitting my peak in terms of raw ability and experience. At least as far as ability is concerned, I really didn't hit a downturn until much later. Now, getting on to 50, I'm noticing that my ability to deal with complexity is quite a bit diminished. But my tolerance for complexity is likewise diminished. When I would have accepted a poorly factored solution, now I scratch my head…

>When you get down to it, do you really want to tailor your code base to the top 1% of coders?

I think I agree with your sentiment, but to me a "top 1% coder" is someone who knows how to make things simple and readable, and knows the best abstraction to use for the goal. It's not the person who can write and/or follow the most complicated code. To me complicated code is generally a sign of a poor coder. There are exceptions, but they're rare.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#257

Post by tjl » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 6:06 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #198

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…

> 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, wh…

The design pattern book came out 22 years ago so they were certainly named as such.

My first Unix programming job had me first learn RCS and then we later switched to CVS. I used CVS personally for years after that until I switched to Subversion, then Mercurial, and now Git. What I'm doing isn't that different from when I used RCS. There's more steps because of the added complexity but it's roughly similar.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#258

Post by new_hackers » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

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…

10x is greater than 2x, so yes it is possible

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#259

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

peterbonney wrote: post #154

amcrouch wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Many, but certainly not all. The best developer I know started his career writing software for the original Macintosh in the 80's. He's still primarily a developer. Here's the important question: how many twenty- or thirty-something startup founders hear that and think "dinosaur who writes GOTO statements" (false), versus "awesome hacker who has been constantly seeking out the newest technologies for 30+ years" (true…

[deleted]

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#260

Post by inanutshellus » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

When I was a 20-something I'd scratch my head at having hired guys that had never heard of version control, and didn't think in OO terms. I turned my nose up to procedural programming they wrote with ease.

I wrote them off at the time out of tech-bias-myopia that is intrinsically age-based. Question is, what will I be written off for that I can then blame on age? What if I disagree with the new trend?

"These young whipper-snappers with their javascripts on the servers! Fools, the whole lot!"