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Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

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Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#41

Post by growlist »

bgribble wrote: post #12

I'm 47 and got my first programming job at 19. I still love it and look forward to a good number more years. I have a few guidelines/principles that seem to have worked so far: * Do meaningful work, whatever that means to you. Maybe it's picking a domain that helps people or society, or maybe it's some other criterion. Ask yourself what meaningful work is to you. * Be mindful about your craftsmanship and always work…

I would add: resist getting sidetracked at all costs. In smaller businesses it's easy to be pushed into work that's contributing nothing to your CV. This is the one thing I would change if I could go back.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#42

Post by irchans »

I am 53 and I started to learn BASIC at the age of 15. I started writing assembly code about 2 years later to speed up the games I wrote in BASIC. I write a small amount of code almost every day (maybe 30 or so lines of Mathematica code), but only rarely do I write 1000 lines a week. When I do have a busy programming week, it is rather fun. I really enjoy writing code in Haskell. It reawakened my love for coding. I still don't understand it well, but I know it well enough to be able to convert almost any of my C++ code to Haskell.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#43

Post by jason_slack »

bra-ket wrote: post #36

Switch to math-heavy domain, e.g. quant finance. Besides being a fascinating field in its own right, the maturity and depth of thinking and experience that comes with age are actually valued here.

I'm doing this now, actually. It keeps my attention :-)

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#44

Post by rwoodley »

What a question! If you don't like what you're doing, do something else. Life is short.

I'm 57. I've been programming since I was 14 in 1974.

Engineering is an exciting profession that applies creativity to complicated technical domains. So it uses your whole brain: you have to master a technical area, and then be creative and build things. What's not to like?

I am always learning. I am now learning elixir, a functional language build on erlang. I have lost count of the number of languages I've learned over the years. I am comfortable on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

Honestly, if you're burned out I get it. But to 'keep the fire' just requires you to have some imagination and remind yourself how cool this profession is.

And by the way, I love being challenged by my younger colleagues. They are a conduit for new approaches and ideas and are essential to grow an org. But yes, I have experience about what is likely to work and what won't - based on many failed projects where I learned what not to do the next time.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#45

Post by rubin55 »

I'm 42, turning 43 somewhere in the coming months. What I gather from your question is actually a more general property of aging imho. As we get older we actually have seen quite a few things before; we've burned our hands a few times and naturally've become more careful and considerate when evaluating choices.

The big advantage of youth is its naïveté; to be able to dive head first into a new idea, uncompromised enthusiasm, strong believe in your abilities because why the hell not! All the patterns are new.

The big advantage of our later years is experience, wisdom, recognizing certain things a viable and others as not so much because we recognize the patterns.

I think that one should be wary of our more negative experiences leading us to cynicism, imho the opposite of youthful enthusiasm. You see, we have the tendency to think we really do know the outcomes of certain things based on our wisdom, but the way the world works, sometimes that is totally counter-intuitive.

Case in point: when I was about 21, I got a 25000 loan to buy a Silicon Graphics O2 with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator + MIPSPro Compiler license (I kid you not) because I wanted to learn about this awesome computer and operating system. It was not a well-thought-out descision (it took me 6 years to pay of that debt). I couldn't afford software for it (hell, Alias Wavefront PowerAnimator was 35000 a seat!) so I decided to call companies that were releasing software for IRIX and bluntly ask them if I could test their software for them. I got on the phone with one guy and he said: "wait. are you telling me you bought a 25k computer just to learn?". I got a job interview the next day. Funnily enough, by buying that O2, I got a job at a graphics software company (my first programming job), I travelled the world because of that descision, met a whole bunch of awesome people and essentially, that thing kickstarted my life + career in a way that I could not have anticipated. My point is: when you think you've seen it all before, or something seems like a bad idea, keep in mind that you often can't really tell the consequences of something. At least, that's what I tell myself and it helps keep the cynical part of me in check.

I think my advice would be: kill cynicism, dive in something new head first without over-analyzing, just for the heck of it, try to find the fringes of your knowledge and push the boundary outward a bit more. Don't over-analyze try to re-connect that enthousiasm you feel/felt when discovering/exploring/coding/inventing.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#46

Post by LinuxBender »

edw519 wrote: post #8

...to make up for a slower brain, less stamina and decreasing memory... This is NOT normal and should not be accepted as such. I'm 63 and have been programming professionally for 40 years. I'm currently working on several projects that are as complex as anything I've ever done. I honestly feel that that I get better every year, build stuff I never imagined a few years ago. I know this is subjective, but I feel like m…

I agree with this. For me, it was a combination of medical and lifestyle. I have taken a very serious approach at fixing those things and have more energy than ever.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#47

Post by beat »

Not necessarily "keep the fire", but one big piece of advice I'd give anyone here - don't stay at any given company more than five years, tops. Three to five years is a good run for "permanent".

I work in the Twin Cities, the Land of Fortune 500 Headquarters. It's a big enterprise town. What I've seen happen over and over is people become "lifers", working ten years or more in a single company, then they get laid off or fired and have no idea how to function in the current job market. Worse, their value is heavily invested in the institutional knowledge of their former employer, sometimes specialized to the point where it's useless outside of that company. This causes a lot of suffering.

If you move on regularly, you'll keep interest more easily, see a broader cross-section of the industry, and not be so hosed if you find yourself laid off.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#48

Post by fecak »

46, and not a software developer, but I recruited for 20 years for startups and now I'm a resume writer and career consultant that works with lots of older engineers. The ones that are happy seem to not stay in one place too long (either moving internally to different projects or changing jobs), so they are always learning new things and often meeting new people.

I think a lot of 40+ engineers are unnecessarily skeptical about startups and smaller companies. Sure, the chances of any individual startup going under are pretty obvious, but once you're in that ecosystem it's not hard to get picked up by others in the ecosystem. Everyone from that startup is going to find work at another, and they'll bring along some friends, and your network gets pretty spread out pretty quickly which provides more and more opportunities.

I'm not even sure what "making it big at 40+" means - if you mean building something technically significant, many won't hit that goal. If it means having a good paycheck and lifestyle, that's attainable for most skilled devs it seems.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#49

Post by irchans »

edw519 wrote: post #8

...to make up for a slower brain, less stamina and decreasing memory... This is NOT normal and should not be accepted as such. I'm 63 and have been programming professionally for 40 years. I'm currently working on several projects that are as complex as anything I've ever done. I honestly feel that that I get better every year, build stuff I never imagined a few years ago. I know this is subjective, but I feel like m…

Wow, at age 53 I am definitely slower. I type more slowly and I remember less. On the other hand, maybe I know a bit more than I did when I was young.

Re: Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

#50

Post by rootusrootus »

fsloth wrote: post #19

"If you haven't made it big at 40+, that means you worked on a lot of failed projects, that makes it harder to believe you can change that." I find it unlikely a programmer, no matter how good, would make it big. There are exceptions, sure, but globally programmer is not a highly paid professional like a surgeon, for example. I don't think there is nothing wrong with a steady paycheck and doing a job that engages one…

A lot of people on HN are in SV (or another big tech hub like Seattle), and make 300K+ in total comp. It's a lot more lucrative [in general] to be a developer in the US than it is in most of the rest of the world.
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