91–100 of 192 posts
I think this goes to the mindset that it is always important to try to prove your skills by example.
I agree with the point- I'm getting older, too- but the reasoning is not strong.
I don't disagree with anything stated here, but how much of this actually is a function of age? I feel like a young programmer could aquire all of these traits also, because they're less about age and more about being able to learn from experiences. You can choose to have more experiences to become the kind of person the article talks about. Or is this a survivorship bias thing? The old programmers are more likely to…
Well I'm not sure if you're young or just playing devil's advocate, but a young person often feels that way. The whole knowledge * intellect idea that someone else here mentioned is far too reductive. You can be a ridiculously smart person who has read white papers and coding books, learned all about discrete math and project management, worked on as many projects as you could, and still not touch the maturity of an…
Agree! this is a succinct description of a eng management problem. However, it can be mitigated by hiring coachable, trainable (and mature) people. Interestingly, we've had great luck hiring from programming bootcamps; programmers who lack programming experience but have other work experience & who are eager and able to learn quickly, & usually come with some level of intellectual curiosity (as opposed to entitlement).
I don't disagree with anything stated here, but how much of this actually is a function of age? I feel like a young programmer could aquire all of these traits also, because they're less about age and more about being able to learn from experiences. You can choose to have more experiences to become the kind of person the article talks about. Or is this a survivorship bias thing? The old programmers are more likely to…
Well I'm not sure if you're young or just playing devil's advocate, but a young person often feels that way. The whole knowledge * intellect idea that someone else here mentioned is far too reductive. You can be a ridiculously smart person who has read white papers and coding books, learned all about discrete math and project management, worked on as many projects as you could, and still not touch the maturity of an…
Is this true? I had a manager tell me once "when you're thirty, everything just starts to make sense" which I now know is total bullshit because I hit that milestone and there was no epiphany.
I think the old have been bullshitting the young since the beginning of time. It's their right, but it's still bullshit. Having a lot to say doesn't make it worth hearing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…
Yup. I've seen 55+ year old programmers write what was essentially a message queue persisted in a database table, processed by a cron job. We frequently had problems with duplicate processing of messages, due to multiple cron jobs running at once. I've personally argued against a key-value store schema in SQL Server and was in favor of a flat-table design. In our case, there were records of different 'types', and eac…
And I have been steamrolled in discussions with 20-somethings as well. "Don't worry, I'll always give you enough time to refactor the tree shaking caused by this design," from a first-time manager is probably my favorite, followed by "this must be re-written, there's no way to salvage it in-place."
They went from consistent if slow progress in defusing the landmines in the old backend to eight months of re-writing everything (frontend included since the data model was also changed) and trying to claw their way back to parity.
Bad programmers will be bad programmers, regardless of age. At least age will put a polish on average developers, letting them work above their raw potential simply because of "I've seen this before; here's how it was solved".
I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40. If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody…
programmers actually need to think sometimes. the jobs mentioned are more routine and rely on soft skills and experience a lot. I do not mean any disrespect by that. mathematicians are also best when they are young, but unlike programmers work in academia and get to teach until retirement, whereas programmers get replaced.
This guy springs to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Babai
Because, yeah, programmers and mathematicians don't actually need any experience, they can just think everything up on the spot!
I also wonder how you imagine that other professions gain their experience, if they don't need to think.
Reason to hire a young programmer based on the confession from CTO: we like college grads because we can drive them hard and pay them minimal salaries. The only thing is they burn out pretty quickly. And yes they also lamented the quality of their software and how releases were buggy and delayed. Not sure they saw a connection there... To attract the candidates they optimized non-salary benefits they thought college…
I have been self-employed for the past ~7 years and it has been great as I have been able to balance work with the first few years of my sons life. Time I will never get back so being able to be there every day has been wonderful. But now I need some consistency so will be looking to find a normal job very soon. I don't care about free coffee/sofa, gym memberships, sports tickets, etc. I just want flexibility so when my son has some school event I can go without having to use up a whole days holiday for a 45 minute show, etc.
I am not looking forward to it though. I know I am going to find it hard to adjust!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…
In my experience, growing older, I've found both of these generalizations to be true in myself. There are plenty of times that I've watched junior developers make literally the exact same mistakes I made 10 years ago. At the same time, I've learned that technology has continued to move on and things that were wrong 10 years ago may not be wrong today. I remember when I started out that I'd scour every line of code fo…
Reason to hire a young programmer based on the confession from CTO: we like college grads because we can drive them hard and pay them minimal salaries. The only thing is they burn out pretty quickly. And yes they also lamented the quality of their software and how releases were buggy and delayed. Not sure they saw a connection there... To attract the candidates they optimized non-salary benefits they thought college…
In my experience, they try not to see the connection. If you try to show it, they'll listen for a bit and then rationalize. If you keep at it you'll begin to see irritation and even aggression.
That a fair number of CTOs have a decent technical background doesn't seem to help much, somehow. I've had this confirmed personally when I got together with a coworker from almost 20 ago who had moved into management. He struggled to keep experienced people because they moved for more money, because they were paying below market value. If I suggest something like paying more, he considers it and then some weeks later I find he's still struggling to figure out a way to keep people, having changed nothing of consequence.
It's my pet theory that (almost all) management wants programming/IT to be a commodity and are willing to pretend that it is, to their detriment. They demand that it be a commodity.