52 here and code everyday, some for work, some for personal development, but most because I enjoy it. I am also manage a security engineering team for a living. I've been coding since I was 12ish. Most of what I code in now is Python for work and Swift and Java for mobile development, which I find a hell of a lot of fun. Mostly making tutor apps for my kids studies.
What I find interesting is that when I walk into a meeting with younger developers they immediately assume I only know cobol or rpg and not the various stacks I work with. Once we start working with them on securing their code they realize what experience brings to the table. It's hard to believe that there are still some programmers out there that don't know what cross site scripting is, or how to prevent SQL injection etc.
I grew up in an era where if I somehow forgot the option for recursive for the rm command I reflexively typed "man rm" and "/recursive" and maybe "/" a couple times. It seems younger people will context switch from the console to the web browser, pull up a google window, search for "unix.stackexchange rm recurse" and slowly scroll thru "About 43,700 results (0.97 seconds)" for perhaps hours, opening multiple tabs. Pe…
Must these posts always devolve into bashing young people? Every thread there is some old guy going on about how stupid young people are.
Maybe elsewhere. My specific examples were inexperience leads to massive time inefficiency which is hardly limited to age, and young people are sometimes a bit inconsiderate of others which seems so universal its not even a bash, almost a definition of being youthful, could be filed as social inexperience. If I wanted to imply they're stupid I'd falsely claim they just don't have the IQ/mental horsepower to figure it out, or they can't generalize that a lot of CLI recursive options tend to be dash-R, or they can't remember and have to look it up every time. But I didn't...
The meta observation is inexperience can lead to not understanding critique. Which again is not even a "youth" thing.
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...
I just graduated with a CS degree at 36; have an offer and will start soon. The age aspect is scary, but I've honestly found it less of an issue than I thought. The most difficult part is pushing past the part of me that says I'm too old to be starting now.
It's not that big a deal.
Just be willing to learn from those who are more proficient than you, even if they are younger.
I'm 52, started writing code professionally in 1985. Started my career on 68K assembler. In the 90's I was a Windows SDK developer (then COM/ATL, etc.), In 1999 started a company but chose Linux and embraced FOSS and built a company on a Lamp stack (sold it in 2014). The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every mo…
Can you tell us a bit more about 'taking 3-6 months off' to learn new things. I'm thinking about doing that myself. Did you take a sabbatical? Is your current company ok with this? What did you work on?
When I say "take 3-6 months off", I mean from distractions of life around you. Most people working, it's not reasonable to take that much time off. What I mean is, focus for 3-6 months on something new, spend 3-4 hours a day -- even if you have to box out some time at night to learning something. Often times over my life, I've told my wife, "OK, I'm going into hunker down mode..." which she new that I wasn't going to be counting on me for "free time" all that much for the next several months because I'll be in a mode of heads-down and learning. Like going to the gym or class, you need to carve out time and make time (weekends, nights, etc.). Make the time mandatory in your day. If you DO have the luxury of taking 30 days off (I know people who do have that), use that time for possibly going to an on-site bootcamp. Another thing I've done is take that 3-6 months and attend a class or bootcamp. With Bootcamp's becoming so much the rage these days, you can go 2 or 3 nights a week and learn a technology in 3 months. It's awesome.
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…
The management track seems unsustainable anyway if the projected career path is seen as Developer -> Manager with no alternative, unless you just keep adding layers of management.
My manager is over three teams. Each team has around ten developers. We all can't be promoted to manager "if" he leaves.
".. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?" Obviously not on StackOverflow. Perhaps they have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site because they either know how to read tech books and sites to get the info they need when they have a problem using pre-existing docs, or conversely, are fully able to debug issues themselves.…
Wow, you sound salty and defensive. Using StackOverflow is often the fastest way to find results. Your implication that it means we don't know how to debug issues ourselves or use pre-existing docs is insulting and farcical. I'm perfectly capable of using other resources—that doesn't change the fact that a quick Google is often the fastest way to reference something I forgot. I'd never hire someone who saw using Stac…
This whole topic is so interesting to me. Software programming is actually, in reality, a mind numbing process involving extremely repetitive actions. Thanks to Hollywood and the fact that technology is transforming our world (not programmers... technology) the myth of the programmer as an intellect has flourished. That is true for most programmers; there are brilliant programmer of all ages who make the tools the rest use, and that's another topic altogether.
The reality is that young programmers are popular not because they're brilliant, but because they are more willing to engage in repetitive tasks for long hours. The idea that older people don't have the intellectual chops is total BS; it's rather that as people get older they lose interest in unrewarding endlessly repetitive tasks. That is to say, they become more intelligent about how they are going to spend their time and their life.
Fred Brooks wrote about that idea in 1975. It seems that the management side still has not learned the lesson.
Management seems peculiarly impervious to almost all of Fred Brooks' ideas: mythical man month, second system effect and the toolsmith especially.
I've read his Mythical Man Month book, including parts of the anniversary / silver jubilee edition, but it's been a while. A couple of questions:
- Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?
- What was the second system effect about? I know I can google, but interested to read your take on it first.
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.
As a 48 year old developer with a lot of gray hair...I've never seen anyone with dyed hair where it wasn't pretty obvious. To me it makes you seem a bit desperate.