51–60 of 128 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outliers. Most of the books written by younger people who have no experience in life will sound immature to anyone above their age.
How many of those great books written by over 40yo authors had never written books before that age allowing them to develop their writing skills?
What a good list. Most Australians would tell you if you asked them that you can achieve something extraordinary, or begin something new after the age of 35. But I think people are just trying to say the right thing. They know it's true in their heads, but I am not sure that their hearts know. I am under the age of 25, so well under 35, and I am hoping to live out this advice, and spend my early years learning to lea…
My degrees were in economics and arts, which I swapped to from CS explicitly because i wanted to learn things I didn't know, not get good grades on things I did. I worked security night shift during uni which let me read and study whatever I wanted while being paid for it.
From there I took an relatively unskilled level job doing order processing with a legal publishing firm. What i consider my first 'real' program was written there. We did all our processing through this crappy slow manual interface with manual data entry, menu selection, and second long pauses between menus and pages. I hypothesized you could map out each menu and form in the entire application via unique pixel patterns grabbed from each screen and wrote a program that could get from any place in the software to any other and knew where in the menu system it was. Then I wrote a simple spreadsheet interface with some simple memory (since I observed huge portions of our entry was the same data/orders from the same customers, so why do we re-enter the same details multiple times?). I hooked it all together and could thus spend the first hour or two of the day filling out the data spreadsheet: the program could then read the spreadsheet and essentially do my job for me. It new how to interface with my workstation, knew where it was, where to go for every order type, didn't get bored or make mistakes and entered everything infinitely faster than a human typist. I have a real soft spot for that program, watching it zoom the mouse around the screen and do everything automatically still makes me feel proud.
From there I moved to a performance manager job where I implemented algorithms to try to back-engineer government rating systems and use our sample of the market to offer predictions before government sources were published.
Then I moved into a research/policy position.
I used this to get work at the national stats bureau: where I volunteered to work on the hard programming problems no one else wanted. I then transferred into the analytics specialist section therein where I started my work and research on data linking.
Then I used that to move cities and got employed by a bank as an analytics specialist.
Then I left there and am now with my current employer.
I'm just over 35, live where I want to live, never stopped learning either programming or my other fields, haven't had to work for any job I consider unethical, have almost paid off my home, started a young family, and am gainfully employed with experience in philosophy, economics, stats, analytics, computer science, security, and publishing :p
I had failed grades and often barely handed in assignments for uni, and now I'm relatively confident I could run circles around most academics.
Anyone who says your best work happens in your 20s is an ignorant fool. Knowledge compounds. I was relatively smart during my 20s, but I was nothing compared to what I am now in my 30s.
I expect my 40s will be even better...
"These writers got their start after age 35"
"crop of “Best 35 Writers Under 35,” "
What about the actual 35 year olds?
Good article, it is obvious that as we get older we (statistically) have a lesser chance of success in winning an Olympic medal or out twitching the best FPS gamers - but for writing and IT work - age doesn't come into it. What does come into it (and why this bias continues) is that perhaps a highly percent of older IT workers are behind the times or irrelevant - some people simply stop wanting to learn and grow.
When you are young you want to dazzle people with your own projects, when you get old you want to have money enough that you get time to dazzle people.
But in the end we never really dazzle people like we did when coding young, because we want to make younglings to feel encouragement, especially before college.
I was expecting a list of entrepreneurs rather than authors, still a good list. Also I didn't realize it was going to be "those that started after 35 & then achieved success" which is a great idea.
Good article, it is obvious that as we get older we (statistically) have a lesser chance of success in winning an Olympic medal or out twitching the best FPS gamers - but for writing and IT work - age doesn't come into it. What does come into it (and why this bias continues) is that perhaps a highly percent of older IT workers are behind the times or irrelevant - some people simply stop wanting to learn and grow.
Haven’t met any that stops growing, what many do though is focus more on the business side and less on the coding, because it’s easier to get money that way. Starting freelancing with their own tax schemes, becoming a power point knight, short IT architect stints. When you are young you want to dazzle people with your own projects, when you get old you want to have money enough that you get time to dazzle people. But…
I'm turning 28 this month and I feel like I'm quite far ahead compared to my peers, yet feel like I'm absolutely still fumbling through life. And when speaking to friends older than me, the majority seem to still be fumbling through as well.
Every rotation around the sun my opinion is solidified that we're all just wingin' it, no matter the age and success can happen whenever.