Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009) • Hacker News Board

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#111

Post by Nasrudith » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #61

Is age discrimination a thing in hiring because: A: old developers cost too much? B: young developers are insecure or incompatible with old people? C: old developers only work in old technology? D: other?

I think E - because HR has vapor for brains.

I know from my own job hunt experience I was largely ignored by many for lacking experience yet after I got the magical peak number I got call spammed for short term positions. And that looks sensible compared to the absolute madness of refusing to hire people for being unemployed that was more common in the great recession.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#112

Post by polskibus » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #105

wrs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Maybe the problem is the big tech producers that introduce new technologies over and over, that don't raise productivity but create churn, force software rewrites, etc.

Tech history looked at from 40yr perspective, really seems like reinventing wheels over and over. I'm not sure if there is another industry with so much churn yet with a lot of rehashing of old ideas.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#113

Post by monster_group » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

azhenley wrote: post #90

A professor once told me that I shouldn't become a software engineer because my cognitive abilities will decline with age, thus making it difficult to keep a job :( I'm at Microsoft now and see plenty of older engineers that have very, very valuable experience and skills. This myth is dumb.

Seems like your professor was also saying that he chose to be a professor so that he can stay employed when his cognitive abilities decline.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#114

Post by antisemiotic » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #17

PedroBatista wrote: post #9

This is generally true. It's a combination of many things, from brain "degradation", ageism, simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ), other more important interests like having a real life and when you really mute all the marketing BS, your delusions and wishful thinking, the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the maj…

> the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life The thing is, it doesn't have to be and, until relatively recently, honestly wasn't. It's a shitty job and a sad life because we have open offices, ticket-tracking systems and daily standups. There was a time when programming was exciting and rewarding.

>open offices

Noise-cancelling headphones are mankind's greatest weapon in the hopeless war against braindead management practices.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#115

Post by ergothus » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

jupiter90000 wrote: post #96

ergothus wrote: post #21

This is definitely a problem, particularly for those that aren't in tech cities with endless jobs, but the alternatives discussed in this article are all....not great. * Work as a consultant - I'm biased here from my own bad experiences, but consultants are often treated as a source of future problems, not solutions. (largely because of communication and incentives, not because of programming skill) * Work in managem…

Re: consultants, depends on the engagement. If you engage with clients where you are effectively the only way for them to get anything software done (ie, not in addition to an on-site engineering team), you can be seen as an invaluable resource that just gets things done for the business.

Doesn't that fall apart over time? The consultant quickly becomes the monopoly provider, and the large amount of previously investment means that the customer can't afford to switch to another provider (since anything from the previous company will either go away (if there's a bad contract) or just ends up being very difficult to maintain. And the consultancy has incentives to create this rather than fight this.

I'm not saying every consultancy is bad/evil, and it is entirely believable that they might choose to be a "good" player and bank on getting a good reputation to make up for any business they lose by doing so - but the overall trend looks like such "good players" lose in the larger market or stay in a small niche.

As I said originally, I'm biased, having seen a few BAD relationships, but I'm trying to remain objective and look at incentives and counter forces. Totally open to hearing counterpoints.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#116

Post by mattferderer » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

Lendal wrote: post #14

I'm 50 and still programming. Programming is all I know how to do. If that was taken away from me, I would just rot to death. I don't want to be anything else, and I refuse to be forced to do something I don't want to do. I'll learn to farm and support myself that way. So, is it still preferable for the manager to not hire anyone and let the work sit undone rather than to be forced to work with a detestable "older" w…

> I'm 50 and still programming. Programming is all I know how to do. If that was taken away from me, I would just rot to death.

Interesting statement. Someone recently told me the biggest problem with US Presidential Candidate Yang's Universal Basic Income plan is that people who have had a successful career in one field their whole life often do not want to learn a new career even if you help them financially while they transition. For reference, the discussion was about winning an election more than solving a problem.

It's very interesting to hear the above statement from someone in tech vs a different industry. Reminds me how similar people across all industries are when often some of us tend to feel unique for some silly reason.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#117

Post by rzzzt » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

codernyc16 wrote: post #92

spraak wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> grinding away at a FANG I've started to propose we s/FANG/Big N/g "FANG" leaves off other obvious big companies, e.g. Uber, and it wouldn't scale to keep trying to add them to the acronym. Here N is used like when one talks about a list "N items long"

NOFANG?

FAAUN-G

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#118

Post by wes-k » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

randrews wrote: post #51

oriolid wrote: post #45

Earlier 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."

Agreed.

Few things to consider: - linters to help move away from code style comments - Peer code reviews (if possible) - inform your team/boss of bike shedding - use a tool like reviewable.io where comments can be marked as blocking or not. I’ll often comment on preferences and block on issues.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#119

Post by f00zz » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

banachtarski wrote: post #66

C4stor wrote: post #46

I'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…

Well, TCP is a hot mess that should and will be phased out in favor of more congestion friendly protocols.

What are those alternatives?

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#120

Post by mkozlows » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #54

stuff4ben wrote: post #32

Mid-40's here. I'm in management but considering getting back into development/architecture. I've kept up with my skills in Java and DevOps and Kubernetes so I have a breadth of knowledge and skills that I know people are looking for. Management was my plan B and honestly I hate it.

A couple of years ago, the company I worked for abruptly went out of business (like, I came into work on Monday and they said, “we’re closed effectively immediately, go home, we’ll e-mail you severance details”). I sent out about a dozen resumes, got two interviews, flunked the first and got an offer at the second - the whole process took about two weeks and I was no longer unemployed. I was on good terms with one of…

Development skills are absolutely 100% more portable than management skills, because a) basic math says that everyone hires way more devs than they hire dev managers, and b) many dev managers get promoted from within so there are even fewer hires out there than there are positions. The further up you go, the more true this is.

Having closely watched someone go through a director-level job search vs. having jobs thrown in my lap as a developer, empirical reality matches theory here, too.