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

341–350 of 440 posts

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#341

Post by mixmastamyk »

delegate wrote: post #156

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…

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

Wanted to call that one out, don't think I've thought about it before, but it's good advice.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#342

Post by dghughes »

epalmer wrote: post #161

I'm going to apologize ahead of time. this might be a ramble. 63 year old white guy with little hair and a lifelong beard that is now white. A tad overweight as well. I feel for so many people expressing angst about ageism. I've seen it elsewhere but not where I work now. I suspect that at the faster growing companies and companies in tech centers, mostly on the coasts, see more pronounced ageism. My last job was at…

>I read these comments from people that are 36, 40, 40+ and shake my head.

I'm 47 maybe there's hope for me yet.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#343

Post by sctb »

PlugTunin wrote: post #154
jgdx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please comment civilly and substantively on HN or not at all.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#344

Post by sctb »

flavor8 wrote: post #198

The problem is not age, it's being rusty. Far too many of the over 40 crowd I've interviewed appear to have stagnated. EDIT - to whoever downvoted me, grow a pair and reply instead of downvoting because you don't want to hear reality. I'm a gray beard myself. I've done hundreds of interviews in the past 5 years and know what I'm talking about in this respect...there are far too many programmers who get comfortable in…

The guidelines ask us not to complain about downvotes in the first place, but we certainly can't go off like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#345

Post by sean_patel »

epalmer wrote: post #161

I'm going to apologize ahead of time. this might be a ramble. 63 year old white guy with little hair and a lifelong beard that is now white. A tad overweight as well. I feel for so many people expressing angst about ageism. I've seen it elsewhere but not where I work now. I suspect that at the faster growing companies and companies in tech centers, mostly on the coasts, see more pronounced ageism. My last job was at…

> I read these comments from people that are 36, 40, 40+ and shake my head. That is not old. 63 is not even old.

Thank you for this. You made my day. I just entered my 20s and am constantly in fear of ageism later in my career.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#346

Post by oppositelock »

kazinator wrote: post #339
riprowan wrote: post #264

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…

Torvalds, 46, can point to Linux and say "I made that, over half a lifetime ago". Stallman, 63, can point to GNU Emacs or GCC and say "I made that in the 1980's". Not necessarily the most recent version of it, but that hardly matters. Gerald Sussman and Guy Steele can point to Scheme and say, "we made that". John MacCarthy was able to point to Lisp and say "I made that", right to the day he died and we can continue t…

That's like saying da Vinci is representative of artists or Prince is representative of musicians. The average person who doesn't achieve software legend status will see their creations vanish as the previous commenter described.

I've worked in this industry for a long time as well, but I'm not someone you've heard of. I too have built some very cool things that I'm proud of, a number of which no longer exist. Meanwhile, a shed that I built myself 30 years ago still stands, and I can still point to that and say I made it.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#347

Post by sctb »

sean_patel wrote: post #28
ljka98 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the site (kettlerusa.com) has crashed now...

There you go. Made my point, despite the downvotes from the Politically correct HN readers.

Please stop complaining about downvotes—this violates the guidelines—and please treat the community with civility by not ascribing to their actions motivations of your own construction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#348

Post by bbcbasic »

gumby wrote: post #110
bbcbasic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maybe it wasn't phrased as intended, but my point is few companies are willing to take someone on just because they haven't done tech X even if they are seasoned in tech Y which is broadly similar and have all of the communication, team working, leadership, problem solving and domain skills. Because they need to "hit the ground running".

The flipside is that of course employees don't hang around along in IT as they need to keep moving to gain the experiences they need to make their CV look reasonable. So I guess it is perpetuated on both sides.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#349

Post by infinite8s »

rdiddly wrote: post #306
treehau5 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really dislike this constant caveat that people keep placing against SV. "Well it isn't a problem outside of SV!" I keep seeing this appear in comment after comment on this article

I guess you're allowed to dislike a fact, but any particular reason you dislike this particular fact?

Because it isn't a fact? There's definitely an age bias outside of Silicon Valley as well.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#350

Post by dj-wonk »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #331
gaius wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Devs should train themselves. If you're waiting for someone to train you, you're not going to last in software development for very long.

Some rhetorical questions: How does a person know if they've trained themselves well? What if part of the training involves interacting with other people?
Post reply on HN