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Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

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Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#151
All the talented devs I have seen:

- They had no kids

Or with 1-2 kids:

- They were old (45+) and had worked as Developer for so long that they became very good at it.

ONLY 1 guy with 2 kids in mid-30s I know is pretty good.

tl;dr - perhaps there is a co-relation between kids and brain cells of a Software Developer.

..I have kids myself...

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd be familiar with c# but it's an easy language, and there are tons of devs with c# experience.

But I'd mainly focus on JavaScript/TypeScript. And if you're about to graduate then focus really heavily on react or angular. Microsoft shops are drowning in .net talent/experience but are starving for good front end devs with deep angular or react experience.

And I wouldn't bother with powershell at all, unless you have wanted to move away from development and towards infrastructure.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd be familiar with c# but it's an easy language, and there are tons of devs with c# experience. But I'd mainly focus on JavaScript/TypeScript. And if you're about to graduate then focus really heavily on react or angular. Microsoft shops are drowning in .net talent/experience but are starving for good front end devs with deep angular or react experience. And I wouldn't bother with powershell at all, unless you have…

This is really helpful, thank you. I've been diving into heavy doses of JavaScript lately -- I'll continue with that and augment it with TypeScript and React too.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#155
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job. Or in other words - apparently quite talented as a coder ; but as an engineer not so much.

To be fair, he was 17. I think you learn a lot about how to be an employee on the job.

I'm not damning his character. Or even questioning his character.

Just saying, from the thumbnail description given of his work habits - you couldn't quite call him an "engineer".

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#156
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job. Or in other words - apparently quite talented as a coder ; but as an engineer not so much.

Nope, sorry, but being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer. It makes you a poor choice for a team and a bad hire, but that's a different story. In other industries it's better defined, you pass the exams, you get the right to use the title. The software industry on the other hand is using the term engineer too liberally - we basically just invent those titles for ourselves, consultant, engineer, architect…

being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer.

The issue wasn't that he was an "asshole"; but that he was undisciplined.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd be familiar with c# but it's an easy language, and there are tons of devs with c# experience. But I'd mainly focus on JavaScript/TypeScript. And if you're about to graduate then focus really heavily on react or angular. Microsoft shops are drowning in .net talent/experience but are starving for good front end devs with deep angular or react experience. And I wouldn't bother with powershell at all, unless you have…

I can attest to this. Having worked in an finance shop myself, there were numerous .NET engineers there but none of which had relevant experience with Angular/React + Typescript.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#158

Most were early and mid twenties; they were my colleague for at most a couple of years before moving on to e.g. Google in Europe or SV startups (working from Ireland until he could get a green card). Another one was iirc late twenties / early 30's, great Scala developer - perhaps too good because his work didn't really land at our customers because they couldn't find any developers that could work with it. (that's mo…

Hey! I’d actually say that’s a... reflection on your friend. I thought for a couple hours about whether to reply to this comment, and I ultimately decided that writing maintainable or readable code in any language is the engineer’s primary responsibility. So if nobody could maintain this person’s code after they were done with it, maybe they were truly brilliant, but not so good on the “raise up the others who come after me” part of engineering :/

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#159
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, sorry, but being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer. It makes you a poor choice for a team and a bad hire, but that's a different story. In other industries it's better defined, you pass the exams, you get the right to use the title. The software industry on the other hand is using the term engineer too liberally - we basically just invent those titles for ourselves, consultant, engineer, architect…

being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer. The issue wasn't that he was an "asshole"; but that he was undisciplined .

He was undisciplined when it came to listening to authority. He was not undisciplined for learning or for solving hard problems, which is what make you a good engineer.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#160
Ive worked with 100s of developers, and 2 stand out. One was around 60 and the other was early 20s.

The one who was around 60 would think through problems at a much deeper level then the entire team. I remember one instance where most of the senior members of the team had been trying to figure out a pretty complex problem and we had little luck. He walked in, we explained the problem, then we went for lunch. Once we got back to the office he submitted a PR a few minutes later, essentially avoiding the problem all together. This guy knew everything from low level computing, to the newest JS trends.

The second young guy was a front end specialist. I have yet to meet a developer who could write code as quickly as this guy. He wrote an entire front end in 2 days for a project I had budgeted a month for. 0 tests, but I could not find a single bug. I taught him how to write some tests, and 24 hours later the entire thing had unit tests, integration tests, and he had refactored some of the code so it would be easier to test. My jaw dropped. He had no formal education, attended a boot camp, and in my opinion was more valuable to the team then I was (at near 3x his salary and 15 years more experience!).

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