Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
On Getting Older in Tech
51–60 of 440 posts
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#52Elon Musk is 45. Does that make him old? Doesn't seem to slow him down. edit: just saying limits seem artificial, that's all
Capital and Labor are different beasts
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're looking for help, drop me a line. As a young(er) engineer, I live in terror every day of what may come down the road.
That's kind of you Dan. Yep -- I remind myself that ageism is the one form of discrimination that eventually affects everyone. There might be more...I dunno, but it keeps me on mission. I run a Medium publication at https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com . If you've got writing chops, I'm looking for contributors. That goes for anybody. Thanks again.
I would like to help you as well. Ill ping you on Twitter.
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#54Age will matter more in a loose job market (more people than jobs). In a tight market as it is today, your skills are front and center, not your age.
That said, the OP is correct. You're only as good as your last two years and even that's pushing it. If the tech changes, you have to adapt with it.
I'm 53 as of yesterday (the 8th). I started with PDP-11's in the 80's, then VAX's, then PC's, BASIC at first, then C, then Visual Basic, then ASP, then C#/ASP.NET, and now I'm deep into AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, Redshift), NodeJS, AngularJS 1.x/2, ReactJS, and I'm still learning new technology all the time.
A lot of developers will transition to management and it's on my mind, but I'm also still drawn to solving problems at a code level. And there's always new toys to play with like Angular and React. Now we have .NET Core and all of its interesting avenues.
If you actually care about being a good developer, you will continue to work.
As long as there are jobs. Nothing will help you if the job market contracts. Then I do believe hiring becomes age-oriented with us older dev's labeled "over-qualified".
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#55One of the things that has made me old (52) and crotchety is that I learned Lisp very early in my career. That gave me the ability to see that 99% of "new" technologies were really just poor re-inventions of (parts of) Lisp. Even today, Common Lisp -- despite (or, as some would argue, because of) the fact that it hasn't been officially updated in decades is still not only a viable language but one of the best choices for many applications. But no one knows it because it's not the shiny new thing, and even young people still can't seem to get their heads around the fact that the parens are a feature, not a bug. And that makes me grumpy sometimes.
The good part was that I was able to build a very successful career while not having to suffer nearly as much pain as many of my contemporaries. The bad part is that now it's hard to find people to collaborate with. :-(
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#56> 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…
In the absence of other information, I'd chalk that up more to the client. This is a shopping site for the US arm of a German manufacturer. Cutting-edge design was probably not of high importance to them. Also, I don't see any claims by this person that they were a designer. What your criticism reads like is a pretty good example of how things like ageism, sexism, or racism sometimes play out. Take something, find so…
> In the absence of other information, I'd chalk that up more to the client.
That is my first thought as well.
Spending time optimizing it for performance may not be worthwhile for the client. Likewise, hosting it in a way that can scale to several times the traffic may not be worthwhile.
This is something you learn with experience. If you deliver a site that's super-fast, with deployment of the latest serverless architecture with the newest UI framework released this week.. but you didn't have time to put in half the catalog, the client is not going to be happy at all.
There are also clients that insist on certain specific things that may not fit with your artistic vision (specific graphics, colors, logo, text, layouts, icons, etc). You have to balance how hard you push back with how much you want to risk pissing off and/or losing the client.
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's kind of you Dan. Yep -- I remind myself that ageism is the one form of discrimination that eventually affects everyone. There might be more...I dunno, but it keeps me on mission. I run a Medium publication at https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com . If you've got writing chops, I'm looking for contributors. That goes for anybody. Thanks again.
I would like to help you as well. Ill ping you on Twitter.
Feel free to e-mail if that works better. john@johnwheeler.org
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#58> 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…
Did they give you a job offer?
Re: On Getting Older in Tech
#59> 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…
There is no truth to what Zuckerberg said - the guy has said many idiotic things in his life, and this one ranks near the top. You're picking the author's website as an example, but it's a single datapoint - not representative of anything. Many younger people code much worse things, and many older people code much better things. I'm slowly reaching 30 (agh), and I refuse to work in any team that doesn't have any memb…
It's not what he said so much as that he said it out loud to a room full of people and no one batted an eyelid.
Imagine the shitstorm if he had said "whites are just smarter" - the lack thereof demonstrates that the ageism problem is very real (probably the only form of discrimination left).