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.
Not a bad post at all and it definitely hit home for me. I'm 43 and have been doing professional development for 20 years (actually 20 years). I moved permanently to Saigon just 1.5 months ago. I'm teaching the Pivotal software engineering process (agile / extreme) to a 100 person consultancy full of really smart ~20 year olds who didn't know or understand process at all. I keep up on all the latest tech and I have a…
Some pretty sweeping generalizations about the culture after only 1.5 months. I live in a country neighboring Vietnam and there are similar perceptions of the culture here, yet in my experience these ideas are baseless and often ingrained in expats well before ever learning the language or sometimes even before entering the country.
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 toget…
This won't change. They've convinced themselves that it is best to move fast always.
But this was fixed with strict mode; this is like criticising Java for not having generics, even though generics were added ages ago. You can still assign/use global variables in the browser, but like the parent says, this is the browser's fault - having to accept old and badly-written code for compatibility reasons.
My biggest problem with JavaScript is that I never can seem to wrap my head around the multiple null/undefined type of values and how to correctly test for them, as well as type introspection. Or, more appropriately, my problem with JavaScript is that it makes that confusing, and I use it just infrequently enough that I forget what I learned last time regarding that. Of course, that's not entirely JavaScript's fault,…
I don't really use null at all. I either just check falsiness, or if there's some chance of the variable being a 0 I check for typeof == "undefined".
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 know, right?
It's things like these that make me kinda regret going into tech. I should've gone into accounting or something like that instead.
I'm 32, and while I'm an excellent mid-level developer, I don't think I'm ever going to be principal or possibly even senior material. And everything I've heard from everyone is that is that by the time you're in your mid-40s, you better either a) go into management or b) hit principal or architect level or you'll be unemployable. I'm probably going to end up unemployable in 20 years, and that frightens me.
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 agree - I started at 38 (41 now) and work on a team as an iOS dev where we have mobile, backend and machine learning engineers - ALL - under 30. My interview was blind, so no one knew I was old - or black. They couldn't discriminate if they wanted to. That said, I couldn't imagine using all the tools on this list to stay relevant. I find reading HN, Apple docs and related blogs, books on Swift and iOS, and just thinking about tech time-consuming but enough to keep me up-to-date or even ahead of my teammates. I do appreciate what he said - I don't image FB would hire me - but Fuck them. Do your own thing then. That's why I got into tech - to stay employed long enough to create for myself. Still, if you have the right experience, someone will hire you if the big names (or startups) won't.
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…
Please. You pick a lowest-common-denominator language like Java or Golang so that you have a large pool of cheap, semi-sentient code monkeys to hire from.
If you choose LISP, you're actually going to have to expend a little bit of effort on identifying, recruiting, and retaining actually competent people. That's a problem when you're looking to put butts-in-seats (as is the case in my industry: defense).
48 yo here, started coding when I was 14, so that's 34 years of building things. Here's where I'm at. I look back at my career and I can tell you about great projects that I got to be part of, awards and plaudits that I won, big paybacks from projects that went well and literally saved the company. That's all nice to have war stories. But I can't point to any of it and say, "I made that" because - and here's the kick…
I'm 46, and I totally get this. My other thing is I'm a painter (though I make all my money from software).
I imagine when I kick the bucket all my software will be long gone, but I will leave a bunch of artwork that will survive for anything from days to centuries, mostly on its own merits.
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…
48 yo here, started coding when I was 14, so that's 34 years of building things. Here's where I'm at. I look back at my career and I can tell you about great projects that I got to be part of, awards and plaudits that I won, big paybacks from projects that went well and literally saved the company. That's all nice to have war stories. But I can't point to any of it and say, "I made that" because - and here's the kick…
I'm 46, and I totally get this. My other thing is I'm a painter (though I make all my money from software). I imagine when I kick the bucket all my software will be long gone, but I will leave a bunch of artwork that will survive for anything from days to centuries, mostly on its own merits.
I also took up painting. 10 years of writing software and most of it is was replaced, deleted. Weekends of learning a new tech that is obsolete in 5 years are gone too.
On the other hand my paintings will stay forever on my walls and my children's walls.