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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#131

Post by eeZah7Ux »

metafunctor wrote: post #123
blub wrote: post #104

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…

Nah. The fact that this post exists is evidence that ageism is a thing. What makes you think older people are passionate about the latest and greatest JavaScript frameworks? That is not my experience at all. New frameworks are just the same old stuff in a new wrapper. We've seen it all several times over. Like, backprop was a cool thing in the late 80s. I, too, find this post sad, but probably not for the same reason…

> Nah. The fact that this post exists is proof that ageism is a thing.

Indeed, ageism exists and it's a form of discrimination. There are societies (e.g. japanese, korean, central/southern european) where ageism works the other way around, at the expense of younger people.

In both cases it's still discrimination and we should acknowledge the problem and fight it instead of trying to look/act younger or older.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#132

Post by mattmanser »

marklgr wrote: post #45
kornish wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At 37 I'm much faster at debugging today than I was at 27. And 10 years ago, I was consistently one of the fastest debuggers in a company of 15-20 programmers. Debugging's always been one of my strongest programming skills.

So debugging, no, definitely not. I can spot root-causes of bugs now even easier than I used to be able to.

And one of the big new skills is that I'm much more able to 'guess' where a bug is in someone else's totally new code-base than I previously was able to.

In fact, I also write code faster as I get the general gist of it done much faster first time.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#133

Post by metafunctor »

blub wrote: post #124
metafunctor wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The fact that this post exists is evidence that ageism is a thing. What makes you think older people are passionate about the latest and greatest JavaScript frameworks? That is not my experience at all. New frameworks are just the same old stuff in a new wrapper. We've seen it all several times over. Like, backprop was a cool thing in the late 80s. I, too, find this post sad, but probably not for the same reason…

It's tough to communicate this accurately. I've noticed a trend in engineers self-evaluating as old on HN to say things along the lines "I am having more fun than ever learning about the cloud/TypeScript/webfoo". Several people on all these "old in tech" threads. I have the feeling these posts are not at all representative of the domain, and neither are the proposed solutions to just learn more, but it's all I've see…

OK, that's probably where our experiences differ. In my experience, the more experienced techies see that there's nothing really new in the new technologies. Many realize that to stay current, they must learn the new tech. But rarely do they really love it, because it's really a step sideways rather than forward.

I suppose it's a form of competition that forces new technologies to pop up all the time. I just wish people would take a really close look at what's already there before spending their prime bestowing the world with yet-another-framework or language.

By the way, I'm 40. I don't think I'm old. I think Scheme is superior to JavaScript.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#134

Post by dragandj »

mVChr wrote: post #93
lisper wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you count as "big". If you look at languages used on github, for example: http://githut.info Clojure is doing OK (better than Common Lisp), but not great (worse than Haskell and Emacs lisp).

Not quite as much activity as Scala either. I think the good thing is that functional languages as a whole aren't going anywhere, it's just that the jobs for them are spread very thin over several languages.

Maybe because in Clojure you achieve more with less effort :)

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#135

Post by smokestack »

metafunctor wrote: post #123
blub wrote: post #104

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…

Nah. The fact that this post exists is evidence that ageism is a thing. What makes you think older people are passionate about the latest and greatest JavaScript frameworks? That is not my experience at all. New frameworks are just the same old stuff in a new wrapper. We've seen it all several times over. Like, backprop was a cool thing in the late 80s. I, too, find this post sad, but probably not for the same reason…

> think you are a useless dinosaur if you don't know what the new hot thing is about.

Welcome to the technology industry.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#138

Post by dragandj »

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…

You are writing this comment in the lisp-based software. Yeah, I know, Hacker news is a simple software and could have been written in anything else, but, somehow, the author, who I've heard is very smart, thought that Lisp is the best pick.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#140

Post by lisper »

lukego wrote: post #120
lisper wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My take is that Language X usually has major deficiencies compared with Language Y for domain Z, for many values of X or Y: Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, Erlang, Haskell, assembler, C, etc. Confirmation bias makes it easy to bind those variables to values that make one's own favorite language obviously the best and everybody else's infuriatingly, irrationally terrible. If unchecked then this leads to wildly false c…

What do you see as Common Lisp's "major deficiencies"? (Pick your favorite value for Z.)

This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.

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