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Not Just Any Old Geek

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Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#261

Post by dfsegoat »

porker wrote: post #122
dfsegoat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The most tight knit people I've met are in military special operations: Nothing comes close to the combination of technical skills, teamwork and ability to mitigate "interpersonal friction" that those guys have, IMO. The telling thing is: Not once have I heard these folks refer to themselves as a "family" - almost like it is an insult to what family really is (separate and sacred). Only have I heard them refer…

> military special operations: Nothing comes close to the [...] ability to mitigate "interpersonal friction" that those guys have, IMO. Any training material, courses or books on this? I need to improve my handling of "interpersonal friction".

Check out any books / articles relating to the Marine Corps' "The Basic School" - It is where newly commissioned officers (and warrant officers) learn how to lead Marines.

My fav is: "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer" - by Nate Fick.

Long story short - The Basic School and training cadre are so effective at producing outstanding leaders, that MBA programs like Harvard and Wharton have built in a number of aspects of it to their "team building" courses / sequences: http://news.smeal.psu.edu/news-archive/2014/united-states-ma...

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#262

Post by agentultra »

I think it takes all kinds to make a good team. Young, old, men, women, and everyone across the spectrum. As an older geek now it's easy to look back at how naïve and energetic I was in my youth... but I did a lot of good work then too. I'm not much slower now but I'm much more calculating and tactical.

I work on a team with an unbalanced mix of age... but working with my younger colleagues is always a pleasure. We help each other back and forth with various aspects of the problem.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#263

Post by filipecalasans »

rubber_duck wrote: post #177
santaclaus wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Even though I am ony 25 I can recognize that all the computing foundations is still the same. I work in a 80's style company deving embedded system and I constantly talk with the founders who used to program the first system we used to sell. They used to implement everything from scratch. Sharing code, open source stuffs and Internet are making our life easier. But at the end of the they the knowledge behind the libraries, frameworks used in the library is the same from the early times.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#264

Post by Swizec »

narag wrote: post #26
Swizec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. No matter how little they work or how much better you are individually. But 1-on-1? Experience wins evey time. I'm not old old yet, but I do have the most experience[1] in my team. Spend the least time at work, strictly 8h/day, and am easily the top contributor by any engineering metric you can think of. Wish I could explain why or how , but the best I've bee…

A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. I wouldn't be so sure. It depends on the problem you're solving. Of course for routine work it would be like that.

By definition most work is routine.

And yes, for phd-level (or almost) research work into new territories, one person teams are best.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#265

Post by driverdan »

dfsegoat wrote: post #58
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…

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…

So you spend 8h working and 6h reading and learning? I'm an advocate for just-in-time learning. Read HN to get a high level overview of the cool shit. Then wait to learn the details until you actually need to use it.

There's always something new and cool to learn. It's pointless if you never use that knowledge.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#266

Post by awt »

I have achieved some consolation for pouring years of my life into technologies which I should have known would become obsolete by spending the last few years studying classical languages (mostly Attic Greek), the knowledge of which will never be obsolete. I believe there is also some value in studying the classics of Computer Science as well (Turing, Shannon, McCarthy, Graham, Dijkstra, etc.), and doing CS archeology (building retro computers from old parts, etc.).

This knowledge won't help me get a job as a coder at an SV startup, but it does help me to understand why I shouldn't try to get it, and to ease the discomfort of a fate of relative poverty.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#268

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #145
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…

> The stuff you did in software 20 years ago has absolutely nothing to do with the stuff that's being done today. The longer I'm in software the more and more I find this not to be true. The stuff that has changed is all surface level. The underlying principles are the same. The skills needed are the same. The attention to detail and other attributes needed to get the job done is the same. The problems are basically…

[deleted]

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#269

Post by sangnoir »

employee8000 wrote: post #228
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.

I hate smug answers like this. I'm old and the young people I work with at Uber are amazing and get tons of things done. Just because you're old doesn't mean you know any better or just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done. Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly. You need to prove yourself every day because this is the industry we are in. And th…

> Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly

Experience is not magic, it is not directly a function of age but of duration in the industry. I'm not even tyat old yet, but my experience (aka larger training set) so far allows me to pattern-match/foresee potential disasters way before they appear on radars of more junior devs: and this goes for technology, people and processes.

> No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available

That's because mining coal is physically exerting. I would hire a 60 year old boilermaker before any 20 year old since I don't want things to go boom.

Edit:

> just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done.

With experience, you know which shit not to do

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#270

Post by awt »

employee8000 wrote: post #228
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.

I hate smug answers like this. I'm old and the young people I work with at Uber are amazing and get tons of things done. Just because you're old doesn't mean you know any better or just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done. Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly. You need to prove yourself every day because this is the industry we are in. And th…

I think an interesting question is - more desirable to what end? To what end are these youths toiling? How, after millenia of evidence to the contrary indicating that experience is valuable, are we to believe that somehow magically it is not valuable? What if the end to which the young are applying themselves (or being applied) is not in fact of any value? Historically young inexperienced men have been considered entirely disposable. Perhaps now they are being disposed of in a different way?
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