Early 40s, so far.
Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
111–120 of 186 posts
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#112Two very different examples come immediately to my mind. These remind me of the fox and hedgehog kinds of intellectual. The fox knows many clever things, while the hedgehog does one thing extremely well.
The first was a 65-year-old DBA I had the honor of working with on Aviation Logistics Systems for the Coast Guard. He was a brilliant architect who re-engineered our database to accommodate any asset and any business rule the organization could throw at us. He had been programming from the days of typing out code on paper and then renting time on IBM mainframes to see it run. He did one thing, database administration, but he was a genius at it. He was a hedgehog.
The second is a 20-something full-stack developer I worked with for six months. He built a laboratory information system that was visually dazzling. It blew customers' minds. I found supporting the code was overwhelming. There were dozens of frameworks at play with layer upon layer of abstraction. Making even small changes to the business model would take me hours to implement. I bowed out of the project, and watched him put in 80-hour work weeks developing it for years. He eventually sold it for a good deal of money, but there was definitely a tax on his health because of it. He was a fox who knew a lot of different solutions and how to patch them together.
Both of these were brilliant developers with very different approaches. I know foxes in their 40s who know how to balance work-life (I consider myself one), but all the 60-plus developers I currently know are hedgehogs with a deep institutional knowledge that makes them invaluable to their organizations. That said, I think we will see foxes in their 60s in the future as full-stack developers age.
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhg, I'd love to be that 50 year old when I arrive at the age. Sadly, I feel like I'm sliding backwards. Oddly, I feel like I was a better, more thoughtful, certainly more energetic developer in my 20's. I think some of it may be that each job I've taken has forced me to change language / platform multiple times. I'm an iOS, android, C++, C, Java, and python developer. All on production level code. Never an expert of…
I decided early in my career to specialize on a technology stack so I could generalize over the entire stack. About a decade ago I got my first job on the Microsoft stack, and since then I've done 98% of my work on it. It has it's disadvantages I'm definitely looked at as an old fuddy duddy because of my language choices. I'm pretty locked in, so if .net dies I'm gonna screwed while I come up to speed on the next big…
I did the same thing for the first half of my career - ASP.Net and C#. But with the fall of WebForms and the rise of MVC, I had to spend a lot more time on front ends (mainly cheap clients didn't want to pay the licenses on Telerik and the ilk), so I had to learn real html and javascript (albeit only jQuery at first).
Now I primarily use those tools on personal projects, and spend most of my day consulting on HOW to develop a project, and only able to get my hands dirty a couple of hours each week. The rest of the time is spent with management "architecting" solutions.
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#114The guy is ~35 in the Air Force Research Lab. My group would work on a project for days before he'd come in and show us a better way. The key though was that he'd work us through the problem and the rationale behind his decision. Probably the best programmer and one of the most talented teachers I've ever worked with.
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#115He was probably mid thirties. I watchrd him grow as a rock solid engineer. He consistently blogs, and owns a database startup among other things.
http://ayende.com is him. Have infinite respect for him.
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same story here. The most talented engineers I know are either in their early 20s or in their late 40s/50s. Of course it's for different reasons. Something many people don't want to admit is that a lot of talent comes from practice and experience, and someone in their 40s is much more likely to have 20+ years of experience than someone in their 20s. The early-20s geniuses I know are talented for different reasons. Th…
That begs the question then, what happens to these early-20s geniuses once they are late 20s/30s?
Genius isn't a static quality. These things come with expiry dates.
Learning is the key to flying high when it comes to a knowledge intensive career like programming.
Its hard to do that a while. Also early 20's you just exit teenage, and a have degree of naivety and foolishness. That spark goes with time. And you become more intelligent, calculative and serious to stop experimenting the way you are before.
But mostly, they stop learning. That's what causes the downfall.
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhg, I'd love to be that 50 year old when I arrive at the age. Sadly, I feel like I'm sliding backwards. Oddly, I feel like I was a better, more thoughtful, certainly more energetic developer in my 20's. I think some of it may be that each job I've taken has forced me to change language / platform multiple times. I'm an iOS, android, C++, C, Java, and python developer. All on production level code. Never an expert of…
I decided early in my career to specialize on a technology stack so I could generalize over the entire stack. About a decade ago I got my first job on the Microsoft stack, and since then I've done 98% of my work on it. It has it's disadvantages I'm definitely looked at as an old fuddy duddy because of my language choices. I'm pretty locked in, so if .net dies I'm gonna screwed while I come up to speed on the next big…
I was wondering if you could give me a little advice as to what I should focus on to more specialize in the Microsoft stack?
I'm on a bit of an unusual track into software engineering, having started in finance and first teaching myself to code via VBA and SQL. That coding led to me getting a second degree in computer science, which I'll be finishing this year (and I now know way too much about VBA).
All that of that preamble to say that I've had a ton of experience with SQL Server, VBA, Excel in my old life. I think I could be a pretty good candidate to fully immerse myself in the .NET stack. However, my school doesn't touch much on the .NET technologies, focusing more on JavaScript, Python, and C++.
Would it make sense to focus on C# and move on from there? Or there other things I should know well? Do you use much PowerShell? Javascript?
Thanks! Sorry if this was a bit long.
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#118Usually in their thirties, although I've met a few quite talented ones (just maybe lacking in experience) in their twenties.
So the usual I guess; I haven't met whiz kids nor luminaries, sadly.
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#119I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum: The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid, absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid 2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow an…
It would be interesting to know what the 50-something was like when they were younger. Did they have the characteristics of the 20-something rock star.
Please don't say "rock star". It's such a tired term, right behind "ninja".
Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?
#120May I recommend “The Talent Code”? It’s an excellent book discussing the concept of “talent” in the context of practice and quality attention. The word talent implies something one is born with. Turns out that how good one is at something has much more to do with the quality of the neuropathways generated by specific practice habits.
Talent exists, and is very real. [0] Talent is immensely important, and I find that there's a growing movement to dismiss it and pretend it's all about hard work. Most people can get pretty good at a particular task if they dedicate enough time. But you're never, ever going to be as good as Magnus Carlsen, Terrence Tao, Michael Phelps, Euler, or DaVinci just by hard work and a positive mindset. [0] https://slatestarc…
You don't need talent to be successful. Not every chess player is as talented as Carlsen but there are several thousand chess players making a living as professionals. Using talent as a prerequisite to success in a field is just dishonest.