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35 Over 35

theamericanscholar.org

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Re: 35 Over 35

#61

Post by craigzucchini »

josephdviviano wrote: post #12
hydrox24 wrote: post #8

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…

I didn't do any of this intentionally. I studied psychology in undergrad and graduated the year of the great financial crisis. Also had a bad GPA, 3.0. I had lots of ideas but there was always a big skills gap between what I wanted to do and what I knew how to do (and what my degree said I could do). I am obsessed with fixing problems in medical decision making (back then it was specific to diagnosis, now I'm more ge…

Out of curiosity, had you done an undergraduate research project / thesis before getting into an MSc program? Also, what do you mean by a professional Masters? I'm still learning the jargon of academia. I'm sort of following a similar path, through dipping in and out of an undergrad CS degree now that I've sort of become disenchant with web dev. 27 now, but hoping to worm my way into deep learning in the Geospatial field or just some aspect of geo-spatial hopefully with some aspect of the work being field work or generally outside. I'm interested in having something sort of official like contributions to papers, and I'd like to put the deep intellectual interests and obsession with ideas to use. I used to have these with regard to frontend dev, but after re-inventing the same problem so many times, that's getting a little boring.

Re: 35 Over 35

#62

Post by stared »

acutesoftware wrote: post #7

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.

For writing breakthrough papers, age is not a major factor:

https://news.northeastern.edu/2016/11/03/new-study-success-c...

Re: 35 Over 35

#63

Post by arethuza »

tjbiddle wrote: post #58

I don't understand: Is 35 normally considered too old to make something of yourself by society? 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'…

I think it's a reaction to the published lists of people who are under something like 35.

NB Regarding the "fumbling through" feeling, I'm 53 and I think one of the comforting things about getting older is realising that it's not just you but that, in general, everyone is pretty much making life up as they go along :-)

Re: 35 Over 35

#64

Post by renjimen »

tjbiddle wrote: post #58

I don't understand: Is 35 normally considered too old to make something of yourself by society? 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'…

I really appreciate career changes and variety in my friends because it keeps it fresh in my mind just how much we're all wingin' it. There's something liberating about that feeling.

Re: 35 Over 35

#65

Post by renjimen »

josephdviviano wrote: post #12
hydrox24 wrote: post #8

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…

I didn't do any of this intentionally. I studied psychology in undergrad and graduated the year of the great financial crisis. Also had a bad GPA, 3.0. I had lots of ideas but there was always a big skills gap between what I wanted to do and what I knew how to do (and what my degree said I could do). I am obsessed with fixing problems in medical decision making (back then it was specific to diagnosis, now I'm more ge…

Great story! Thanks for sharing. The older I get (33 now) the more I realise that keeping yourself moving forward, learning, experiencing new things, comes down to chance encounters with people and opportunities. We just have to get out there with a positive mindset and an interest in new things. Getting good and comfortable in a career early on can make that challenging.

Re: 35 Over 35

#66

Post by donkeyd »

arethuza wrote: post #63
tjbiddle wrote: post #58

I don't understand: Is 35 normally considered too old to make something of yourself by society? 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'…

I think it's a reaction to the published lists of people who are under something like 35. NB Regarding the "fumbling through" feeling, I'm 53 and I think one of the comforting things about getting older is realising that it's not just you but that, in general, everyone is pretty much making life up as they go along :-)

> everyone is pretty much making life up as they go along :-)

This has also been my observation at 30. I've worked with people all ages and people of all statures and most people are just doing what they think is right and not much is based on facts. Even high ranking people at fortune 500 companies are just doing what feels right to them and often their success is more related to people below them working their asses off than their leadership. The only difference between people who are in control and people who don't, is often that the former don't have a realistic view of why they're successful.

And, as a nuance, there are of course people who are really good at what they do and that have a lot of knowledge. A lot of people, however, just were really lucky (or really good at networking) to get where they are. Even some Nobel Prize winners just got lucky:

http://www.physics.org/featuredetail.asp?id=71

Re: 35 Over 35

#67

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

BigJono wrote: post #32
freyr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people really think this way, besides young people and tech managers? I'm over 35 and my productivity and capacity to learn new things has only continued to grow over time. It's true that many exceptional artifacts have been produced by people when they're relatively young. I think this is more a byproduct of ignorance (i.e., seeing the world with a fresh pair of eyes). But as this list shows, maybe age isn't the…

I think maybe it's possible that given a very smart programmer with 1-5 years experience, the value of not having had time to learn the wrong way of doing things far outweighs the value of another 10 or 20 years experience. A lot of our 'best practices' seem curiously tailored toward keeping mediocre developers in check and producing consistent rather than extraordinary results. Maybe our industry just grinds the gre…

There’s that saying, something about 10 years of experience vs 10 years of doing the same thing (‘1 year of experience 10 times’ or something like that).

I also remember someone bringing up a good point (it might have been here or something I watched, I can’t remember) that software engineers don’t actually get that many ‘attempts’ at doing a full software system from scratch. How often does the average software engineer get to design a system from requirements, build a system from scratch, take it through production and then into maintenance in that length of time?

Re: 35 Over 35

#68

Post by chumali »

wickerman wrote: post #59

I always remind myself that Paul Gauguin started painting for the first time at 35, and almost at 40 decided to stop being a wealthy stock broker to live as a painter. Regardless of the ethics of that decision (he did leave everyone in his family behind, after all) I do think it's pretty impressive that he picked up a profession like that so late and developed it in such an impressive way (I love his artwork, I think…

> decided to stop being a wealthy stock broker to live as a painter

He lost everything after the 1882 market crash and eventually moved to Tahiti to pursue the allure of the 'free-spirited and noble savage'. Whilst there he took three teenage brides and infected them with syphilis, from which he himself eventually died.

Re: 35 Over 35

#69

Post by nguoi »

ekianjo wrote: post #20
webwielder2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pretty dumb thing to say given all the excellent books written by younger people.

Outliers. Most of the books written by younger people who have no experience in life will sound immature to anyone above their age.

Good writers are outliers, most books will sound immature. When the author's gatekeeping would get rid of much of Shakespeare's output, maybe it's too much?

Re: 35 Over 35

#70

Post by CalRobert »

tjbiddle wrote: post #58

I don't understand: Is 35 normally considered too old to make something of yourself by society? 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'…

I don't think it's the age, it's the other life obligations.

In my early 20's I was in college. Graduated in 2008 in to the recession and was lucky to have _any_ job. Spent all of my nights learning coding.

In my mid-late 20's, starting in 2011, I finally got a crappy job with a pay cut in tech (sort of) doing ad operations. I worked hard and spent the evenings getting better at Java so I could use the Dart For Publishers SDK to automate things I hated doing at work (inadvertently helped the company make about a million extra bucks that year, I later realized).

In my early 30's, I got married, changed countries, became a Technical Account Manager, studied Python and German in my free time, and eventually became a dev for a video game company.

In my (our, now) mid-30's, we had a kid, and now I spend my free time on that and house repair, etc. I still like coding but after dinner, bath, bedtime stories, maybe 15 minutes chatting with the spouse, and then other chores, I'm going to bed (before anyone asks, I watch 0 TV and do very little by way of social networks).

I have a colleague who's in his late 20's, no kids, and he's on Slack all. the. time. He talks about stuff he worked on (for work, not for hobbies) over the weekend. I don't think I produce as much as him, to be honest. Makes me a bit anxious about where I stand - hard to compare my 40 hours to effectively his whole life.

I think I need a plan B.

(Related discussion - and the article is 10 years old so the young'uns then are getting in to their 30's now) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580

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