141–150 of 258 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, any suggestion for a COBOL book ? jk what would you consider a solid, time-proof set of fundamentals ?
Don't joke, COBOL is insanely profitable and a stable career path. Every large institution has an old COBOL mainframe running some mission-critical software that they can't upgrade away from.
I'm 49! I've been working since I'm 17 as a developer -- I think the KEY thing is to be valuable, and be able to change quickly BUT not as quickly as the snowflakes. Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff--, that will help you learn ANYTHING computer related quickly, and continue surfing that wave with whatever tech you fancy might actually be…
So, any suggestion for a COBOL book ? jk what would you consider a solid, time-proof set of fundamentals ?
Oh and be fluent in C -- you might not like it, you might despise it, you might think whatever you might think of it, but you will find 10 examples of anything in C for any programming problem you have.
Basically it's like being able to read/write Ancient Egyptian when finding a stone with wierd symbols on in the desert.
Then do a small run on how compiler works (you know some assembly, and you know some C now to match) from then you can infer how an interpreter works, and even infer how a JIT works. You'll get to understand how the Javascript in your browser actually /works/ -- that's more than what 99.9999999999% of the population will ever know :-)
Then feel free to play with other languages, quite frankly, I'd suggest not getting enamoured with one in particular. Ultimately, they are all the same. Make sure you understand how a garbage collector works, how dynamic loading of libraries works, and more generally, how the operating systems works -- no need to get in details.
Just ^^^ THAT makes you more knowledgeable than many people throwing O-n's problems around the place.
I'm 49! I've been working since I'm 17 as a developer -- I think the KEY thing is to be valuable, and be able to change quickly BUT not as quickly as the snowflakes. Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff--, that will help you learn ANYTHING computer related quickly, and continue surfing that wave with whatever tech you fancy might actually be…
Instead of listening to you and I (age 50) there are some young people who would rather claim that basic/low-level/first principles knowledge is irrelevant.
I've never been 'age discriminated' before
I have. These coder-bros I was interviewing with accused me of Googling the answers and started in on the complete condescension. (I was doing the classic dynamic languages programmer thing and writing a quick script to answer their question programmatically.) Nothing fundamentally age-discrimination about that. It was how they spoke to me and treated me after that. Sometimes I still get mad or sick thinking about it. One thing I've learned, when people are projecting things on you which contradict the facts, that's a big symptom of bias.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll just tell you now I've got a T-shirt with "Copland Driver Kitchen" :-)
You have me beat, but I have a coworker who used paper tape. That is, computer data storage was via holes punched in a long strip of paper. Another coworker wrote Alternate Reality, which was a game for the Atari 800XL 8-bit home computer. Finding these experienced people isn't easy. Many don't want to move. You can't just drop by a college and grab them in bulk. We'd hire more (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?…
When I first learned to program (I was about 12), I was using paper tape and those old Bell teletypes, in a facility that still used punched cards.
Here's my punched card story -- I bumped a box with a card deck and it sent the cards flying, mixing them all up. The systems operator made me sort the cards by hand. It took me hours. It was a few months before I learned that they had a machine that would have done that for me automatically -- but the sysop had decided that I needed to learn a lesson (which I did, in fact, learn!)
Value. Are you valuable. You can be 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 it doesn't matter. If you are valuable, you will find a job no problem. The 50 year olds who complain are the ones that offer no value and have essentially 1 year of experience doing the same thing (badly) for 30 years.
> The 50 year olds who complain are the ones that offer no value and have essentially 1 year of experience doing the same thing (badly) for 30 years. Google Settles Age-Bias Lawsuit for Undisclosed Amount https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-05/google-se... IBM targeted old people for lawyoffs https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a... Intel accused of age discrimination https://www.th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool; I'm about the same age, been getting paid to do, for the most part, what is called 'devops' today since 1993, though unpaid a number of years before that. I'll confirm and reinforce everything you're saying here. Six weeks after I decided to move companies, last year, I had three excellent job offers to choose between, and even more that were less great but still doable. > you should be GOOD I like to think tha…
>I did some amazing stuff earlier in my career, and I long desired to find a place where I could go even further, but I've come to realize that it's unlikely to ever come about again. Can you elaborate?
Starting in the 1990s, I was in the 'devops' team inside of Network Engineering in an enormous and enormously successful (to this day) retail chain. At the time, we were told by AT&T, our biggest WAN provider, that we were the largest centrally managed network they were aware of. Even larger than any one of their own various management regions. When I left there in the early 2000s, there were tens of millions of IP addressable devices on the network, and my team wrote the software that managed and monitored most of 200,000 Cisco and Nortel routers, switches, access points, and other kinds of devices.
At the time, this retail chain was, on average, opening or relocating a new store every day, and each store had a surprisingly large network. Also, we were pioneers in just in time delivery.
So, the network had to be extremely agile (we had people all over the world, all the time, being paid to mess around with our hardware in the form of upgrades, installations, rollouts, etc) and exceptionally stable.
Store shelves would start to go bare after an hour of network downtime at one of our hundreds of distribution centers, across 10 countries. (The 'bareness' would happen many hours later, of course.)
For most of that time, I was the technical leader of the automation team inside of Network Engineering. NE itself had on the order of 40 or 45 network engineers, plus the 5-7 people on my team.
At that scale, automating 99% is about as good as automating 0%. EVERYTHING needed to be automated. And, as things changed, rapidly, my team's automation had to be ahead of it, all the time.
For most of the years I was there, my team delivered spectacularly. We even hit 99.9999% global network availability one quarter. Note: this is absolutely not a bullshit number. The sense of urgency and focus demanded that all assumptions were tested all the time, and availability metrics were very accurately calculated.
The monitoring system I designed and we built was state of the art at the time, and in some ways, even compared to the offerings today.
True story: an NCR contractor (who we widely used to do the in-store hands on work) decided to start stealing our equipment in Southern California. He knew we had redundant store routers; the frame relay circuit plugged into one, and the dial backup circuit plugged into the other. He knew that when one router was to be taken for service and another wasn't immediately available, the procedure was to plug both network lines into the remaining router; our automation handled that and kept dial testing.
So he walked into a number of stores, did that, and walked out with an expensive router.
When he was caught, the data from our monitoring system was featured in the prosecutor's case against him.
We guaranteed within less than a minute of accuracy that any managed device that fell off of the network would be noted and reported. And so it was, and he did go to jail.
From a technical perspective, I'll just say that the entire system was built around the paradigm of message oriented programming. Neither I nor any of my team members knew about erlang at the time, but the system we made organically had many of the same features and strengths.
And, finally, just before I left, I was pushing forward into using machine learning techniques to do truly predictive network monitoring and management. The initial results were extremely promising.
I'm relatively young, but it baffles me that there's age discrimination is an issue. Do companies think I won't like working with someone who's significantly older than me? What's the issue? This is a bit of rhetorical question--I get that there are stereotypes and companies want to build young, hip teams, but personally I find it short-sighted and naive. I'd rather be on a diverse team, age included. If I go for an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I did some amazing stuff earlier in my career, and I long desired to find a place where I could go even further, but I've come to realize that it's unlikely to ever come about again. Can you elaborate?
If stated briefly, it tends to come across as self serving and disingenuous, and I don't have time to add the necessary political and technical backstory to avoid that. But fuck it, here's the brief, high-level. Starting in the 1990s, I was in the 'devops' team inside of Network Engineering in an enormous and enormously successful (to this day) retail chain. At the time, we were told by AT&T, our biggest WAN provider…
Can't you pretty much directly apply those lessons learned to Highly Scalable system design and implementation?
Seems like your skill set would be in very high demand, after a couple of Udemy Docker and Kubernetes courses.
I'm 49! I've been working since I'm 17 as a developer -- I think the KEY thing is to be valuable, and be able to change quickly BUT not as quickly as the snowflakes. Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff--, that will help you learn ANYTHING computer related quickly, and continue surfing that wave with whatever tech you fancy might actually be…
The big money question is: How have you managed to stay passionate about your job? I just posted a comment in another thread about burnout. It's very common in our industry. I believe it's due to the Coolidge Effect. Aka, the brains inherent search for novelty. It's a struggle to not look at almost all programming tasks as just some variation of the same problem, if you've been doing this long enough. How do you keep…
But I can't think of a better industry than software development to satisfy the search for novelty. There's always something new and interesting to learn.