Goodluck with your YC application
Not Just Any Old Geek
281–290 of 305 posts
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#282As 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…
You have to be careful to not sell yourself short. Someone with your level of experience is more likely to avoid pitfalls and look at the bigger picture which is very valuable. A slower pace may result in fewer bugs, resulting in lower overall costs.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#283Earlier 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 ?
Just because people did not use a standalone program for version control does not mean that they did not version their code. This goes all the way back to card/tape drawers and paper tape revisions (there is a great anecdote about this in Steven Levy's Hackers). Look at software from the late 1970s/early 1980s - there will be versioning information there, and usually changelogs describing what was changed. A lot of operating systems also had file versioning built into the filesystem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system#Impleme...) that was used for revision control. Since most of these OSes were timesharing systems this was in effect team-based version control.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#28437 (!) ironically, 37 was the last age at which i felt "young", for some vague psychological reason 38 was the year that tipped me into "sliding towards middle age".
Same here (now 39). Also same initials but with an "s" in the middle :-)
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#285Earlier 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…
Are you saying experience counts for nothing? Besides for the muscle memory of being able to knock out a script quickly, there's also the advantage of having seen weird one-off problems before.
To give a simple advantage, not really a one-off problem, but a dev was wondering why a function in his cron script wasn't working when the same function was working fine elsewhere in the application. I told him to check that cron was using the same config file as the webserver, but I only knew that because I'd seen the same thing before. No amounts of energy will give you that 'seen this before' experience. I remember the first time a server ran out of disk space really confused me - non of the logging/error messages seemed to make sense and the behaviour of the application seemed weird. It takes experience to pick up these patterns. Age isn't the best heuristic here, because a 25 year old might have 15 years experience, and a 40 year old might have picked up programming only 5 years ago, but experience counts.
> I have 5 side projects gathering dust at home because after work, commute and kids, I'm exhausted. It's easy to keep up when your only commitments are work and relationship.
That's just you. I've known young people with the same commitments of relationships and kids, and old people who could fully commit themselves to work so I don't think your point about time constraints hold.
And outside of Silicon Valley, I don't see this same enthusiasm for young people. Maybe it's the bias of the field I'm in (business software) but with age also comes industry experience independent of programming knowledge (I used to naively think automating all processes was the end goal - there are some processes that shouldn't be automated for good customer relationships). Bear in mind most successful startups are started between the ages 35-45 - source here - http://www.forbes.com/sites/krisztinaholly/2014/01/15/why-gr... - and the people who did the study attributed it to industry experience.
At the end of the day, the best filters/heuristics aren't visibly external ones like age (or race) but practical ones like discussions on theory, conversations about commitment - actual data about the subject matter.
> No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available.
I'd definitely prefer a 60 year old doctor (I don't mean a surgeon, but a consultant), lawyer or accountant. Do you think coal mining is more similar to those or to coal mining?
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.…
You're comparing great old people with shitty young people. I know plenty of very shitty old people and a lot of great young people that would invalidate what you said above. And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology, that can code quickly, etc. most just want to keep doing what they're doing and earn a paycheck which is fine but then they shouldn't complain when th…
You might have misunderstood me. My point is experience is a great asset to any developer, young or old.
> And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology, that can code quickly, etc.
That might mean that the great old people are either not great at these things despite their efforts (which I believe is your opinion), OR it could mean the old people optimize for the things you did not list, and don't place too a lot of value on "coding quickly", for example.
> And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology
There older I get, the more I realize there is more to life than work. I mean, I love technology, web development particularly (because the web is awesome for humanity), I really do enjoy it. However, I can make better, more fulfilling use of (some of) my weekends and evenings than staring at my laptop, rewriting an app in LatestHypeJS. Is there any other industry that requires much running just to stay in one place?
Bear in mind the "younger faster models" won't stay young forever.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#287Earlier 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…
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 coder…
In twenty years you'll be in your 70's. Most people in their 70's are unemployable, no matter the field.
If you don't have a retirement plan, then you got to do some extreme saving and lifestyle adjustment (or you'll face even more extreme lifestyle adjustment once you retire).
If you do have a retirement plan, you have nothing to worry about.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#288My 2 cents... 1 - The key to avoiding age discrimination is looking for a boss your age or older. Nothing stops the applicant from pre-selecting companies this way. This is also true if you have kids. 2 - There's less age discrimination ("cultural fit") in the Peninsula than SF because execs are more likely to have families.
>The key to avoiding age discrimination is looking for a boss your age or older. //
So age discrimination is how you avoid age discrimination ... hmmm.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 38, and I now find myself being coaxed into management. I was away from the Valley for about a decade and returned 4 years ago. My career has basically continued from where I left it despite not knowing most of the hot technologies when I returned. I simply learned them, and avoided the fads. Experience definitely helps you sidestep cargo cult development, spinning your wheels and wasting company time. I've worke…
"You might feel uncomfortable moving away from your vim window into the meeting room, but that's where the greater rewards are" Greater financial rewards, maybe. But not necessarily greater intellectual or emotional rewards. Not everyone's cut out for or enjoys management or running a business. There are people who just love getting their hands dirty in tech and hate meetings, power point presentations, kissing up to…
"Not everyone's cut out for or enjoys management or running a business."
That type of thinking will do you in. If you can take technical resources and produce a functioning system, then you're cut out for management. The people problems you'll encounter are largely irrelevant. Learning your charges' quirks, dislikes and styles is like learning a new language or API.
And if you believe in Alan Turing's compelling philosophical argument that people are just fleshbound Universal Turing Machines, then it's easy to carry over from development to management. You just end up putting a fleshy, slower, intelligent computational layer between you and the dumb, fast calculators you normally solve problems with. Program the people to program the machines. Abstraction is a core concept in development.
At some point you'll see that you can create bigger things by commanding a team or department. A single person rarely ever makes a huge contribution on their own.
Re: Not Just Any Old Geek
#290Earlier 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.
I picked up the CVS habit almost exactly 20 years ago (1996) from someone in the banking & finance industry -- hardly a bastion of radical adoption. By then, CVS was 10 years old. We used RCS extensively to manage config files.
To the earlier parent who mentioned process isolation: You're thinking too much about the consumer/desktop world. The entire enterprise world was used to it and demanded it, be it on (hey, humor here) SCO UNIX (yes, they really did make a useful product before they turned evil), SunOS, VAX/VMS, MVS, BSD UNIX, etc.
The desktop world was far behind the state of the art in commercial systems in those days. Even in the 80s, you were quite possibly running your enterprise with an Oracle database, on fully memory-protected hardware. Heck - you may have even been running some of your stuff in a VM on an IBM mainframe. We took some big jumps backwards in pursuit of making computers cost-effective enough for mass adoption, and it took a while before the consumer side of things jumped forward to become the same platforms used for enterprise use.
Kids these days. ;)