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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#101

Post by bbcbasic »

gumby wrote: post #65

Ageism is real in the Vally but it can cut both ways. In my current company we did a SWOT analysis and one of our advantages was "many old farts, and many former colleagues friends". Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us but it's really valuable if you have already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. And in your 50s you're probably an empty nester, and can easily…

> Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us

> already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime.

What is it with this industries lack of interest in investing in people yet demanding so many hours that you can't learn anything new at least nothing deep. Why not just make everyone a contractor but pay them appropriately as a result.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#102

Post by onion2k »

vishbar wrote: post #94
onion2k wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why don't people build amazing and popular things with it? The reason is because "best" can have more than one meaning. Languages are usually only "best" at one thing, not for all things. In the case of many languages that people consider to be "best", they've been optimised for the development process (making it nice to write code in) rather than speed (C) or security (Ada) or a specific niche (R) or maintainab…

> There is an argument that Ruby is mostly LISP, so it could be said that lots of people use it very happily everyday. How is that? I thought Lisp's "killer app" was its extremely powerful macroing system. Does Ruby have an equivalent?

It has class level declarations which do the same thing.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#103

Post by lisper »

jodrellblank wrote: post #81
lisper wrote: post #55

One 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…

Even today, Common Lisp is still one of the best choices for many applications. Then why don't people build amazing and popular things with it? I don't mean one or two people build one or two things, but lots of people building lots of things. Nobody uses it, but it's the best choice, can't both be true. And 'nobody uses it' is approximately true. It's not a mainstream JVM language or CLR language, it's not an AWS or…

Sure, in practice people's beliefs about languages can become self-fulfilling prophecies. And the thing about self-fulfilling prophecies is that they are actually true. For example, Javascript is tremendously useful even thought it is a horrible language from a technical point of view, it's just that the sheer weight of people using it because everyone else is using it results in enough infrastructure that you can get useful things done in in Javascript despite its (lack of) technical merits, not because of them.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#104

Post by blub »

I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad.

It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear.

That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest web trends. Your reward: you are still employable.

And why is it that most older people answering on these threads are so passionate about learning and about new technologies and the latest and greatest javascript frameworks. Do they really enjoy having such ephemeral knowledge and basically competing with anyone that's finished a bootcamp or not even that?

It all seems fake. Like they're trying to put on a brave face while at the same time being scared and trying to convince themselves that all this new and shiny tech that they work with is awesome.

Why not have an honest conversation instead of pretending that learning some thing or another will make everything ok in the end?

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#105

Post by nnain »

Young software developers scope out the projects (time required to develop a project) very differently from older engineers. Seems like the industry has forgotten the role of the QA engineer! With experience, you know that you need time for architecture, risk planning and putting things in production. I see younger engineers quoting 1-2 months to just about every project; just earmarking enough time need to put together some frameworks and write a basic code. Cloud technologies and new frameworks definitely do make building projects easier. But scaling up a product is still not very easy and casual usage of several new frameworks, comes back to bite very often.

I just hope people stop being so hurried about seeing the first cut of their products. That itself would fix some issues around this topic.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#106

Post by jpatokal »

reikonomusha wrote: post #86
jodrellblank wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even today, Common Lisp is still one of the best choices for many applications. Then why don't people build amazing and popular things with it? I don't mean one or two people build one or two things, but lots of people building lots of things. Nobody uses it, but it's the best choice, can't both be true. And 'nobody uses it' is approximately true. It's not a mainstream JVM language or CLR language, it's not an AWS or…

A few notes: * Google actively develops one of the Lisp compilers. Google Flights powers Orbitz, Kayak, etc. That's Lisp. * There are several Lisp compilers in active open source development. * There's a graph database written in Lisp called AllegroCache. It's good enough to support a business (Franz) for more than a decade. * Another company (LispWorks) also exists and has a large portfolio of clients. * Lisp has be…

I don't even code in Lisp, but I knew the Google Flights engine would come up, because it seems to be just about the only "serious" application ever written in Lisp. And it wasn't built by Google, but their acquisition ITA, which hails from Boston and MIT's Scheme reality distortion field. (And even MIT has stopped teaching SICP in Scheme...)

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#107

Post by crdoconnor »

mianos wrote: post #69
rifung wrote: post #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…

Also Atlassian says the same. They said last week that they just can't get senior people in Sydney. Personally I feel older people are not as good at the little puzzles they set as an entry test.

Oddly Google's and Atlassian's software have been getting steadily worse over time but I'm sure that's just coincidental.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#108

Post by lisper »

lukego wrote: post #96
lisper wrote: post #55

One 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…

> And that makes me grumpy sometimes. If you will excuse a moment of cheekiness... Could be that you have cause and effect backwards here: because you are grumpy you are dismissing 99% of other language developers' work as rubbish. Could be that it's less than 99% and you are overlooking some great ideas.

That's not cheeky, it's a perfectly fair question. Yes, that is certainly possible. And there have been a few cool new ideas that have come along that are not easily subsumed by CL, like Haskell's type system. It's easy to implement Hindley-Milner, but actually using that information to inform the compiler, plus adding laziness as a core language feature, is much harder. But I think the jury is still very much out on whether or not Haskell is really a net win.

But the most popular language on github at the moment is Javascript, and there is no question that it is simply a very badly designed Lisp with C syntax. This is not intended to disparage Brendan Eich. He had a week to design and implement something, and under those constraints he did a pretty amazing job. But I can't help but imagine how different the world would be if he had used Scheme as a starting point.

Was there something in particular that you had in mind that you think I may have missed?

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#109

Post by gaius »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #54

Age 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, the…

Age 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.

The fact that people are still claiming there is a shortage of tech workers, demonstrates that that isn't true. The industry wants young, cheap workers who come ready made with the trendiest skills, then it wants to ditch them rather than retraining or allowing them to accrue seniority, and hire new ones, who will work 80 hours a week for free soda and "stock options"...

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#110

Post by gumby »

bbcbasic wrote: post #101
gumby wrote: post #65

Ageism is real in the Vally but it can cut both ways. In my current company we did a SWOT analysis and one of our advantages was "many old farts, and many former colleagues friends". Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us but it's really valuable if you have already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. And in your 50s you're probably an empty nester, and can easily…

> Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us > already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. What is it with this industries lack of interest in investing in people yet demanding so many hours that you can't learn anything new at least nothing deep. Why not just make everyone a contractor but pay them appropriately as a result.

I guess I phrased that poorly! I meant battle scars are important: not everybody will have them (some will acquire those scars in the future). In other words, experience is important.

Sometimes experience gets in your way ("No, a scripting language will be too slow for this") and other times it saves you a huge amount of grief ("Really, we had better plumb that now, it will save us a lot of pain down the road").

Not sure I suggested many hours (quite the opposite) or not learning anything new.

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