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Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

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Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#231

Post by epalmer »

ams6110 wrote: post #210
epalmer wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of my first programming classes used PL/1. Terminal, not punch cards. I remember liking it OK, but never used it other than that one semester.

I never used it outside of class. I think it was an IBM proprietary language if memory serves me correct.

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#232

Post by pjc50 »

justin66 wrote: post #120
cryptonector wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.

Does anyone with 20 years experience refer to themselves as a "full-stack developer?"

I've jokingly referred to myself as "full stack from transistors upwards" - I've done (professionally) a little bit of everything all the way from chip design to web server administration.

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#233

Post by mcv »

Am I in the top 13% at Stackoverflow? I had no idea, but I'm going to use this as a new source of pride, just because I can.

I don't consider 40+ very old for a programmer. My father was 65 when he retired from professional programming, and at first continued working on an open source project (though that now seems to have stopped). I've always seen plenty of older programmers. Only at the few startups where I worked was I one of the oldest programmers, but even there the demographics get more balanced as the company grows.

The weird stories about Silicon Valley's love for inexperienced programmers where 30 is apparently old, sound weird and alien to me. I get better as I get older and more experienced.

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#234

Post by mcv »

krapp wrote: post #138
cryptonector wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.

I'm in the awkward position of having only gotten a CS degree and taken programming seriously after 30, so I suppose I'm the worst of both worlds. Of course, I also started going gray at 30, so...

After 30 is totally fine. I know several programmers who either switched to programming around 30, or had a long break from programming. Sure, you may be a junior developer while younger people may already be senior, but there's time to catch up, and with a bit of maturity, you may have a far better attitude than young cowboys who think they know everything.

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#235

Post by mcv »

eshvk wrote: post #187
metaobject wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML" I thought it was the other way around. With ML taking a more statistical approach to traditional AI problems.

Apparently the new hotness is AI. The last five years have seen titles with similar(ish) roles evolve from Data Scientist -> ML Engineer -> AI Engineer

I studied AI back in the 1990s, but these days it seems to be called ML everywhere. To me, ML sounds like the new hot name (of course it existed back then, but it was less commonly used).

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#236

Post by JdeBP »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #91
coldtea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how someone can "have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site". If you've been programming for a couple of decades and you don't follow the trends du jour it's actually quite easy (note: I'm not at that level myself). Seasoned C and C++ programmers, for example, don't have much to learn from Stack Overflow in the same way a (1) new programmer, (2) 0-20 years programmer who constantly…

Windows programmers had the MSDN, or whatever it was called. MS provided lots of example code and docs.

As many companies did. It came on discs. In the post.

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#237

Post by humanrebar »

nudded wrote: post #217
humanrebar wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Could you go more into detail how these story points would work. It seems like in the end a story point would always be associated with a number of days (or hours).

I measure effort, complexity, risk, and dependencies all with one number. If you don't

Things that affect story point values for me. Note that some are more about quantifying "risk" than "how long will it take?".

- how "big" is the change?

- how many parts will be changed?

- are the exit criteria vague or open to interpretation?

- is the change easy to test?

- do we have sample inputs and outputs?

- will we have to design for a tricky deployment?

- will we have to design for a tricky rollback?

- will it be hard to peer review?

- if this feature is impossible or more expensive than we thought, will we know early or late?

- is any of the code being changed extra finicky?

- do I need lots of help? code from other teams? approvals? new software installed? new hardware?

- can I iterate on this code? or does it really need to be perfect the first time?

- will we have developer 'concurrency' or 'parallelism' issues? can anyone chip in and help whenever? or is one distracted expert the only one that can do this?

...for me it's an intuitive guess at a number that flattens all that into something we can use to prioritize work and decide that work needs to be broken down more. What exactly is on that list will vary, certainly, but I would put on anything that could cause bugs, make you wait, or make you underestimate a task.

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#238

Post by noxToken »

lwlml wrote: post #184
noxToken wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea behind estimates is to get you to think about the scope the work that is to be done. Quickly walk yourself through the process, give a SWAG, do your best to track your time spent on the task, then review what you got right and wrong in your estimate. It's less about giving the exact time required (in theory - some managers will never understand that) and more about estimating if you have time to complete X,…

SWAG means what in your example?

Silly Wild Ass Guess

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#239

Post by godmodus »

metaobject wrote: post #163
godmodus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full stack is just new age lingo, and sure why not. We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML, we say devops instead of sysadmin, we say cloud instead of vps/hosting. Times change and so does language, true to any old fart out there, and the old farts to be.

"We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML" I thought it was the other way around. With ML taking a more statistical approach to traditional AI problems.

I come from an age that used csv wranglers. ma pa was a csv wrangler and so was his pa before him spits into bucket scrapins hard work lad.

Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

#240

Post by norea-armozel »

numinary1 wrote: post #62

What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" Would anyone think it odd for a 60-year-old physician to still be doctoring, or a 60-year-old lawyer to still practice law. Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft. Corporate culture embraces the notion of management as a profession. I think programming would benefit greatly from more of a tradecraft model, where leaders…

Honestly, I'd rather be led by a "dinosaur" programmer than some marketing or MBA geek any day. At least then I know that my boss would go to bat for me when it's clear something is achievable within the capacities of the team or department. I've worked for too many clowns that think computers are magic boxes where you just whisper a few words into then you get a fully fleshed out platform out of it. Seriously, it should be a legal requirement that you have at least a year of experience in the profession you'll be acting as manager in.
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