Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Getting Older in Tech

corgibytes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 440 posts

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#151

Post by PlugTunin »

100pctremote wrote: post #68
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…

His reply couldn't sound more scripted

Your response couldn't sound any less sympathetic.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#152

Post by shaftoe »

rimantas wrote: post #130
IshKebab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Nobody enjoys having their hard-earned knowledge become obsolete (hence the "X11/bash/sysvinit/etc were good…

> Ruby, Docker, React, etc... Just for the record, Ruby is 21 years old. Ruby on Rails is 10 years old.

Also, I wouldn't include docker in that list. It's evolving rapidly into a core component of many platform frameworks.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#153

Post by metafunctor »

blacktulip wrote: post #139

Any language is superior to JavaScript.

No.

JavaScript, the core language, is OK. Sure, there are warts, like this, lack of a good module system, and weird type coercions.

Most of the bad rap JavaScript gets is because it lives in the browser, and the DOM, with all the cross browser issues that come with that. It's not all JavaScript's fault. In fact, most of it is definitely not JavaScript's fault.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#154

Post by PlugTunin »

jgdx wrote: post #150
ash wrote: post #114

Article mentions "RPG" many times: "RPG back-end", "RPG developer". For those who wonder what it it (like me), it is not a "Role Playing Game", it is IBM RPG language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG

How the author failed to explain this abbreviation is beyond me. Who in their 50s doesn't know that you spell out important concepts and key terms, then shorten them in parentheses?

STFU.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#155

Post by metafunctor »

smokestack wrote: post #148
metafunctor wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I've been here since the late 80s. What do you want to learn?

Tell me how you've survived in technology without learning new technologies!

Not sure why you think I haven't learned new technologies.

I have learned them whenever I needed to. Most of the new technologies are not that special. That makes them easy to learn, but, also, kind of annoying because I can see that they're just repeating a mistake I've seen 20 years ago already.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#156

Post by delegate »

Take acid and go to crazy festivals if you want to stay young. No really, do it once at least.

You need to bathe in youth from time to time in order to experience it - it's fantastic.

Of course you need to keep up to date, try to use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time.

For example, C/C++ is going to stick around for a while; make sure you're up to date (C++ 14 and C++ 17).

Pick technologies with a steep learning curves, don't try to compete with 20-year olds doing Javascript Bootcamps - go five steps deeper.

Broaden your horizon - read poetry, listen to all kinds of new music, watch experimental movies, travel around, talk to foreigners, eat weird food.

Study physics and philosophy, psychology and economy.

Have lots of sex - your wife will love you again :)

You have kids ? Great! Learn from them - everything. Try to teach them what they study at school - see if you can figure out a better explanation. Notice how much new stuff you learn about the subject, about yourself and your kid!

We're all getting old(er) every day - as we age this process seems to accelerate - and one day we will be no more.

But inside us lives the kid, the 20-year old, the 30-year old. It's still there, it can still be crazy and fun, we just need to remember to go on a date with our younger selves. All the rest will follow.

At least that's what I'm telling myself :)

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#157

Post by Terr_ »

gaius wrote: post #92
soham wrote: post #71

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial…

the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds Algo-on-the-whiteboard interviews favour people who have recently been cramming for their final-year CS exams - by SHEER COINCIDENCE they happen to be in their early 20s...

Exactly, it's the choice of evaluation criteria.

Meanwhile, experienced developers have their brains tuned towards on-the-job skills that are harder to cram (like an instinct for edge-cases) while "shelving" the stuff that you don't need.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#158

Post by snarfy »

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…

I've been following the technology my whole career. I am still employable, but it gets old.

My advice to younger devs is to focus on general computer science fundamentals and application development skills. Those are the only skills that stay with you and grow as your career advances. The technologies always change so don't memorize them. Keep a reference around instead. Memorize things like design patterns and sorting algorithms.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#159

Post by tmerr »

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…

>Nobody uses it, but it's the best choice, both can't be true

Sure it can. It is possible for both to be true, as long as developers don't pick languages rationally, which they probably don't.

There are a few biases at play. One is that people are only exposed to a subset of the languages that exist, which are those that are either used in industry, or are making the rounds in news. Another bias is that we like to pick languages based on familiarity. For example most of my college courses used imperative languages: Python, C++, and Java. From that experience I am quicker at thinking in terms of for loops than folds and maps. So when I try a language like Haskell or LISPs I think "That's neat!" but when faced with a deadline I switch back to something closer to my first languages.

It could be that I am the only one that thinks like this, and everyone else sits down and spends equal time on every language in existence, but I doubt it.

In any case at one point LISPs were popular, so why did they lose all of their momentum?

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#160

Post by smokestack »

metafunctor wrote: post #155
smokestack wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me how you've survived in technology without learning new technologies!

Not sure why you think I haven't learned new technologies. I have learned them whenever I needed to. Most of the new technologies are not that special. That makes them easy to learn, but, also, kind of annoying because I can see that they're just repeating a mistake I've seen 20 years ago already.

I obviously don't think you haven't learned new technologies in 25+ years. It seemed like the claim to ageism was that the kiddies expect you to know the hot, new technology. Requiring knowledge of new technologies for candidates isn't exclusive to veterans. And it's definitely not a requirement of the other 90% of companies that are using older technologies.
Post reply on HN