171–180 of 272 posts
Well, I am 37 and in my Junior year of a Computer Science degree. I'm not gonna lie, this freaks me out a bit. I do live on the east coast though, hopefully that will help some.
I'm not kidding here… If you're eligible for a clearance, move to MD or VA and work for a DoD contracting company. I'm 29, but most of the people I work with are 40-60+. Ageism simply doesn't exist here and the salaries (6+ figures for new grads) and benefits are excellent.
> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and fr…
Note also that the statement is also talking about the "half life", indicating an understanding that there is a part to expertise that is less susceptible to aging. One can criticize that the concept of half life is misapplied, because the underlying process isn't stochastic, i. e. that half of knowledge will not again half in another half life. But then one would be splitting half hairs, which of course is one of the engineering skills that never go out of date.
>> With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea. Silicon Valley believes that bold ideas are the province of the young. Well, right now I don't see any "bold" ideas coming out of SV. What I see is everyone doing "X with deep learning", or "Facebook for Y", or "Uber for Z but with deep learning"). That's, like, the o…
> What I see is everyone doing "X with deep learning" Agreed. Even Google is guilty. Press releases from them that don't mention "Machine Learning" are becoming rare. "Machine Learning" is the new "cloud" buzzword.
> "Dan Lyons, a fifty-one-year-old Newsweek reporter, gets his first shock when he’s laid off. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college,” he’s told" I wonder to what extent, the above is the reason behind senior workers having a harder time finding/maintaining their job. It almost sounds like a Keynesian liquidity trap. People expect their salaries to continually grow over the course of thei…
How do you signal that you'd be willing to work for low pay though? That would look really weird on a resume.
> “Those holding more negative age stereotypes earlier in life had significantly steeper hippocampal volume loss and significantly greater accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques." I'm a bit disgusted that the article asserts this is somehow causative - that ageists age worse for some sort of karmic reason. The screamingly-obvious interpretation of that data is that people who see bad examples of…
Here's the paragraph in question & full: Karma’s a bitch: the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging reports, “Those holding more negative age stereotypes earlier in life had significantly steeper hippocampal volume loss and significantly greater accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques.” Ageists become the senescent figures they once abhorred.
Nowhere does it imply any causation. The reference to "Karma" isn't the author professing his believe in the cosmic power's intervention to establish justice among the people. It's just a rhetorical devise to highlight the finding.
> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and fr…
This mythology leads directly to horribly created software that will either ensure many terrible security breaches in the future or the continued proliferation of "magic" throughout a product. One of the issues is using the word "engineer" for any of the brogrammer types. an engineer in any other proper engineering discipline does not become worthless with age, their experience actually counts for something. Somehow…
My fiancee who is a commercial bank loan underwriter made this observation: There are some people who have been in her industry for decades, but effectively have little experience, because they don't examine their decisions and figure out why things went right and went wrong. Then there are other people who have far less "experience" in terms of the number of years they have been working, but are effectively more experienced, because they can analyze new opportunities using the data they've encountered before.
Experience as a software developer does count for something, so long as you're aware, and you're constantly developing models for evaluating cost/benefit and risk. If you can add in the ability to deal with and manage people, then you will have a very valuable and uncommon toolbox of skills!
> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and fr…
60 year old dev here. I have been living on the cutting edge of tech for 30 years, and I have many scars to prove it. New is usually not better if you actually want scalable, maintainable, and monetizable results. I disagree that many area's of my knowledge has a half life. My deep understanding of network protocols hasn't aged. My deep understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases hasn't aged. The principles of distribut…
It doesn't help my outlook that sites like this limit me to only 2 comments per hour because of the way I cast this whole industry in such an unfavorable light. Dog eat dog.
> "Dan Lyons, a fifty-one-year-old Newsweek reporter, gets his first shock when he’s laid off. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college,” he’s told" I wonder to what extent, the above is the reason behind senior workers having a harder time finding/maintaining their job. It almost sounds like a Keynesian liquidity trap. People expect their salaries to continually grow over the course of thei…
This is only true if you're doing it wrong. I think, at least for most people, their skills and the value they bring tend to grow steadily and linearly throughout their careers until they retire. It's just that, after a certain point companies believe they'd rather have another fresh body than a more skilled professional. So, skills and salaries grow linearly for a few years, at which point companies are willing to pay no more, salaries plateau and people jump ship to other careers. I'd still be coding today if I could count on even a few % year-on-year salary growth, but I hit the same plateau we all do and moved on to other things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This mythology leads directly to horribly created software that will either ensure many terrible security breaches in the future or the continued proliferation of "magic" throughout a product. One of the issues is using the word "engineer" for any of the brogrammer types. an engineer in any other proper engineering discipline does not become worthless with age, their experience actually counts for something. Somehow…
When you say "brogrammer" it makes people not want to read the rest of your comment. Please be civil on HN and in general in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it be because older people are also going to be much more unwilling to try something new ? Noophilia seems to be a feature of youth.
I don't have any numbers on this and would welcome any, but it seems true. How many young people are willing to sign up for $how_new_website_of_the_week vs older people? My personal experience is that older people realize that the website will likely disappear within the next 2-3 years, so they ignore it until it actually catches on. Younger people seem willing to sign up for anything new. How many young vs old peopl…
I consider myself an early technology adopter, have been all my life. But as I get older I'm less interested, not because I'm older, but because new technology companies are actively choosing to ignore my needs as a customer and my interests.