201–210 of 270 posts
My goal is to be the last programmer standing who started on IBM punch cards ;) By the way, I was at an Azure Bootcamp on Saturday (great event!) and there was a 70+ year old there with his laptop doing the labs. Programming and exercise are two of the three best ways to stay young.
What in your opinion is the third one? (Starting curious?).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fred Brooks wrote about that idea in 1975. It seems that the management side still has not learned the lesson.
no, it only seems that way because the powerful silicon valley and finance giants are the only ones with access to the top-tier young talent. the rest of the young people out there are inexperienced and not that smart, and definitely aren't worth a six figure salary. so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.
I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. You build it, you support it so keep your phone and laptop by you at all times outside of work" shtick that a lot of tech companies beat the young guy devs with.
"StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?" Not wasting time filling out online surveys? I'm not even 40 yet and I realised online surveys were a waste of time years ago. :-) A stackoverflow survey doesn't measure the answers of stackoverflow users. It measures the answers from the specific demographic of stackoverflow users who are inclined to ans…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Saying "I don't know" when asked "How long will it take" or "When will it be done" ~5 years experience speaking: How do you do this? I have a very good boss and he knows things, objectively, like "estimates are very squishy," and "developers suck at estimating time" etc. But he still demands time estimates to give clients. Our clients are often agencies, and they get it as well. I do estimates like "10-40 hours, de…
> How do you do this? Give half-order-of-magnitude estimates as confidence intervals. Avoid using "hours" or "days" as estimates. Story points work really well here. Be extra clear on priorities and burndowns to make it clear that you're not just blowing them off. Give short but frequent demos (not just reports) of progress. If later they're concerned about progress, you can point back to all the times you reviewed t…
My current boss likes to ask "is it a day, a week, a month, or a year" and while sometimes I just want to say "yes, it's one of those" I actually think that's a pretty reasonable way to ask the question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you want to work in a place where they care about such things.
Not all bias is conscious, or intentional. The hair dye may not be a bad idea, just temporarily, during the search. Get a pro though, obvious shoe polish color is, er, obvious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Saying "I don't know" when asked "How long will it take" or "When will it be done" ~5 years experience speaking: How do you do this? I have a very good boss and he knows things, objectively, like "estimates are very squishy," and "developers suck at estimating time" etc. But he still demands time estimates to give clients. Our clients are often agencies, and they get it as well. I do estimates like "10-40 hours, de…
I have a rule. If I trust the PM, I always give my best estimation and a level of confidence on this estimation with the risks. Like: - I think it will take a week, but this part looks a bit complex, so we may have delays. - Or, I did something similar last month, so I am quite sure that will take 3 days. A good PM will know how to deal with this information and what to expect. If I don't trust the PM, I just add mas…
You know in your mind it will take you 3 days
You give me, your PM, an estimate of 2 weeks
I report up the chain that it will take a month
When it's all said and done, you end up getting it done in a month by the skin of your teeth :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mid 40's and older had to learn without the use of the internet. Programming as a profession wasn't ubiquitous as it is now for that same age group. Above 50 and they didn't have a computer in their house growing up. I'm mid 40's and I had one by 9th grade, but it was a high bar for entry compared to today.
52 and I started with a KIM-1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 (mowed lawns to save up for it, still have it, still works). Been programming ever since and rarely use SO (most of the time I just read the code when I'm trying to grock some aspect of a library.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
can you justify the 3-5x difference in annual compensation that younger developer makes can you justify the 2-3x difference between you and a guy who was been coding for 5-7 years ?
3-5X? What country is this? Typically in Silicon Valley there's a rapid rise in the first 5-7 years and then it gets pretty flat (say, 1.1X or 1.2X not 2-3X) unless you're actually taking on a bigger role (and thus getting paid for those responsibilities rather than "experience" per se). When you look at it from a company cost perspective, the ratios get even smaller. The fixed costs (desk, power, healthcare, etc) ar…
First 5 years = ridiculous year over year growth, including getting raises without having to change jobs!
Next 5 years = slow growth, generally have to change jobs in order to get a raise.
Next 5 years = flatline, cost of living increases only, IF THAT.
I don't know any other professional field that plateaus this quickly.
I'm 42, programming is the fun part of the job (meetings, nonsensical time estimates and travel tend to be worst part of the job). Had a computer my whole life (Vic-20, oh yeah!) I strongly agree with what others have said in the article: Keep learning new things. I did nothing but C++ for 13 years (console games) and felt like a dinosaur. Despite the fact that there are still (a few) C++ jobs out there, I made a poi…
I'm 63 and started coding FORTRAN in High School on a GE teletype. Did just a little coding. Went to college and took a FORTRAN class and a PL1 class. I loved PL1. All my undergraduate coding was with punch cards. IBM 360/50. Im graduate school for engineering I coded just FORTRAN with punch card images but on a terminal. So that was 1000 times better than physical cards. IBM 3090. Then Apple II, IBM PC, IBM PC-XT, I…