Yes! The most important thing I learned in academia is to never stop learning and to always push yourself to never get stale. Learning doesn't stop at high school, college or grad school.
On Getting Older in Tech
41–50 of 440 posts
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#42It makes sense to plug https://oldgeekjobs.com I've taken a small break from working on it, so the traffic has died down some, but feel free to post your tech jobs for free for the time being.
Any update on how the site is developing?
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#43Elon Musk is 45. Does that make him old? Doesn't seem to slow him down. edit: just saying limits seem artificial, that's all
How much hands-on tech involvement does Musk actually have in his enterprises? I imagine his focus is on business, leaving the tech for the tech professionals that are hired by his businesses.
> How much hands-on tech involvement does Musk actually have in his enterprises?
From multiple interviews, Elon has stated that he spends the majority of his time on engineering and design problems, and very little time on business, PR.
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#44> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30
I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very much like to hire senior people as well but they're much harder to find.
I wonder how much of what he said is true vs ageism.
On the other hand, I wonder how much of a natural bias there is against older people if they have to go through the same interview process because it felt like a mental marathon to me. Although the interview only lasts a day it took a couple days for me to recover.
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that - very broadly speaking - old guns are better at strategy and young guns are better at tactics. The energy and interest of the young lead them to find the local maxima more readily, and the experience of the old help you find the real maxima rather than the local. Or put another way, young'uns will get you out of the rabbit-hole more quickly, but old'uns will take you down fewer rabbit-holes. Both mindset…
Would you mind expanding a little bit more, from your perspective, on what falls into tactics and what falls into strategy?
In that context, to me, tactics is writing & debugging code, compiling stuff, settings things up to work with other libs--ie. mostly hands-on tasks.
Strategy is more about planning, architecture, knowing about the real pros and cons of different solutions eg. libs, tools or languages.
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#46It makes sense to plug https://oldgeekjobs.com I've taken a small break from working on it, so the traffic has died down some, but feel free to post your tech jobs for free for the time being.
Any update on how the site is developing?
Traffic has been driven by HN. I haven't had any blog posts make the front page of HN for a month (i haven't written any). I've added some new features like sort by date and salary.
I've made it free to post, and I'm going to keep it that way while I get some more blog posts out.
I tried pitching to some reporters with no luck--I read a good book "This is how you pitch" by Ed Zitron, and I'm going to try some of that. Turns out I didn't know how to pitch at all.
Also got an open source project I'm going to try to incorporate into some of the blog material. It's not done, but I might as well plug that here too. Worked on it all last month.
https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-live-starter
Thanks for asking!
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#47> Want an example where the programmer codes in something other than “antiquated” RPG? How about HTML5, JavaScript, and C#? With all due respect, Sir -- and I understand I will be in your shoes in 4 decades -- the site you've built, using HTML5, JS, Grails, Groovy and what not I presume - kettlerusa.com - has the look and feel of a 90s website (think the whitehouse.gov * unders Bill & Gore's administration), esp. tha…
I didn't downvote you, but your claims (and Zuckerberg's) about the intelligence and aptitude of us old folks (I'm not even 40 yet) are just absurd. As regards UI, usability and the like, your comment is highly subjective and entirely unsubstantiated. And your comment in your third edit is just as absurd as your notions about old folks: the site's author(s) likely never intended the site to be part of, e.g., a HN sur…
> but your claims (and Zuckerberg's) about the intelligence and aptitude of us old folks (I'm not even 40 yet) are just absurd.
I never made this claim. OP's post makes this claim.
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much hands-on tech involvement does Musk actually have in his enterprises? I imagine his focus is on business, leaving the tech for the tech professionals that are hired by his businesses.
> How much hands-on tech involvement does Musk actually have in his enterprises? From multiple interviews, Elon has stated that he spends the majority of his time on engineering and design problems, and very little time on business, PR.
PR BS & founder worship. If he wasnt spending time on PR he wouldn't be doing interviews
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#49An interesting thing happened to me in college. As I progressed through it, I found I learned more complex stuff with less effort. A big part of it was I was able to see what was important to learn and not waste time on irrelevant things.
As I get older in tech, I have a similar experience. Of course, one can go too far and think everything new is irrelevant :-)
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any update on how the site is developing?
Traffic has been driven by HN. I haven't had any blog posts make the front page of HN for a month (i haven't written any). I've added some new features like sort by date and salary. I've made it free to post, and I'm going to keep it that way while I get some more blog posts out. I tried pitching to some reporters with no luck--I read a good book "This is how you pitch" by Ed Zitron, and I'm going to try some of that…
Unsolicited suggestion: it's very interesting to follow what entrepreneurs are upto, the ups and downs of launching a business, you should consider blogging about your progress. This is something the indiehackers guy does and it's fascinating to read.
Good luck with oldgeekjobs!