What are some common Plan Bs?
Starting law school next week!
Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
101–110 of 446 posts
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, TCP is a hot mess that should and will be phased out in favor of more congestion friendly protocols.
We barely could get IPV6 to get adopted. Replacing the whole TCP ? Most probably not. The successor to TCP if it ever gets adopted, will look more like TCP than a new protocol.
Agreed. Entire industries are based off the distinction of the stack and it's interoperability(sp?).
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion this is much, much better than trying to decipher what the heck that one co-worker pushed to production and how exactly it broke things. Of course there are ways to smuggle rubbish through code review, but it's still better than no reviews.
Both have problems. The best system is one where a passing review means "I feel comfortable maintaining this;" too often a passing review means "this is how I would have written it."
IMHO, review processes should concentrate on identifying problems, not solutions.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#104This doubly goes for ops guys (who used to be called sysadmins but now are all kinds of fad of the moment names, I still like sysadmin but I notice many devs and CS tend to look down on it... but I digress)
IAC and other newer tech has largely shifted the perception about sysamin'ing and has caused a huge swath of people who haven't been keeping up to have to turn to plan B. Even when you see a Linux admin or engineer pos they often really mean SRE or something else.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#105I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The older guys, they seem like they had the time to correctly learn the unix network tools, the jvm debugging ones, the memory inspection ones. I've known older devs for which I have the utmost respect because I felt like they can just debug t…
Amen to all that. OA> Herein is the source of the problem. The more irrelevant experience a candidate has, the more lopsided the utility/value equation becomes… No, the source of the problem is the idea that 10 years of “C++ experience” is “irrelevant” to a project using Rails, as if development experience is somehow locked to the language you happened to do the development in. Being a valuable senior developer is ab…
I worry the real problem is not that managers are looking for someone who can do the job, but someone they can exploit.
The gleeful exuberance over 'new' things is something you can use against a younger programmer.
The older one who knows the vintages doesn't get as excited, because it's really not that exciting. You haven't discovered Shangri La. We've kinda already done 90% of this before, just maybe not all at the same time.
But there's good exciting and bad exciting, and it takes a while to learn the difference (I work with a bunch of people who apparently have not).
What's bad excitement look like? War rooms, for one. But they are the same dopamine hit as Stockholm Syndrome and so the battlescarred have bonded while the rest of us are doing everything we can to stay out of war rooms (I haven't been in one in well over a year).
I've started calling these people BASE jumpers, because they're adrenaline junkies. There are not so many older BASE jumpers (I hope it's not because they're all dead). I think you learn to value other things besides adrenaline. Like teamwork.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#106[deleted]
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#107I don't know. I feel like there's a pretty clear power law governing the skill-ceiling below which additional experience adds actual value to dev work. ~80% of programming labor (testing, basic REST services, static web content, managing a small-to-medium-size SQL database, etc.) has a very low skill-ceiling. I've been in the industry for 7 years, I now run my own show doing all of these things. It's just simple grun…
> ~80% of programming labor (testing, basic REST services, static web content, managing a small-to-medium-size SQL database, etc.) has a very low skill-ceiling. You’re specifically talking about web development and have listed 0 of the things I, am embedded developer, do in an average day. All programming !== web development. There are more difficult problems out there than throwing up a web page. Especially in perfo…
I'd say 90+% programmer jobs these days are working on web applications one way or another (whether UI, back end, or a service to support back end). Even when they're rich client UIs, like phone applications, the main guts of the application generally lives online and requires an internet connection to access.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...senior roles in BIG dev shops are filled by hiring people who know how to operate in a big company, and you don’t have those skills. I'm not convinced of that. I was recently hired as a senior engineer at a large tech company that has more engineers than the sum total number of employees at every other company I worked at previously. My skills transferred just fine.
I'm sure of that, but the problem is not when on the job, but while interviewing.
Not sure what you mean.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#109I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The older guys, they seem like they had the time to correctly learn the unix network tools, the jvm debugging ones, the memory inspection ones. I've known older devs for which I have the utmost respect because I felt like they can just debug t…
I had a recent conversation with someone who was into electronics & programming 40+ years ago as a youth. He has had successful careers in other non-related fields. He recently was messing around with a Raspberry Pi & remarked how little things have changed & how easy it was to jump pack in.
I strongly believe an employer is very short sighted if they are more concerned in a specific framework than knowledge as a whole. I agree, learning a framework doesn't take much time. They all borrow their patterns & ideas.
If your needs are urgent for a person to hit the ground running on a specific framework you should probably hire a contractor. If you want an employee you should care more about people & project skills, plus overall programming/IT knowledge.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#110I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The older guys, they seem like they had the time to correctly learn the unix network tools, the jvm debugging ones, the memory inspection ones. I've known older devs for which I have the utmost respect because I felt like they can just debug t…
The article mentions this:
> I know you love programming because you like technology, so this may go against your very nature, but no one says you’ve got to jump every time some snot-nosed kid invents a new way to run byte-code. You have invested a lot of time and energy mastering the technology you use, and your experience differentiates you. Money follows scarcity, and snow-birding on an older technology, if you can stomach it, may just be the way to protect your earning potential. The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology. It is highly likely that you will still be able to earn some decent coin in the technology you know and love even after a few decades.