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

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

#181

Post by ehnto »

asdfman123 wrote: post #135
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…

Yeah, you hear all these horror stories about how developers have a "shelf life." In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. Look at any hobby -- say, guitar playing. The difference between someone who's been doing it for 4 years and someone who's been doing it 20 years is ridiculous. They're so much better. I feel…

> As long as you get off the sinking ship of technologies that are obviously waning (and you should have at least a decade of warning in advance, I think)

You also don't need to get on the ground floor. Every technology boom creates next years legacy apps, there will be React work for years after the next tool gets popular for one example. The article touches on it, but you can make a good living out of consulting work for older technologies.

Another angle is moving into non-tech domain specialization. Becoming an eCommerce consultant, your value proposition isn't knowing React/Shopify/Demandware etc, it's knowing the eCommerce ecosystem and domain. I know devs who specialize in agribusiness, automotive software, construction, energy infrastructure and such. They build solutions to problems in those spaces that happen to be software. But they get hired based on their time in those industries not their current tech stack.

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

#182

Post by adamredwoods »

I used to work in advertising as a graphic designer. Age discrimination is rampant there, I would suspect more so than software development in some ways.

Therefore, software development is my plan B. I have a friend who is older than I, and he's specialized in SQL. He only does SQL, and he's still finding jobs. If I needed a plan C, it would be taking up legacy code base that seems to never disappear.

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

#183

Post by Stratoscope »

asdfman123 wrote: post #135
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…

Yeah, you hear all these horror stories about how developers have a "shelf life." In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. Look at any hobby -- say, guitar playing. The difference between someone who's been doing it for 4 years and someone who's been doing it 20 years is ridiculous. They're so much better. I feel…

One thing I've noticed is that there seem to be a lot more older developers and engineers at hardware-oriented companies.

I currently work at Wing Aviation, the Alphabet drone delivery company. We were originally located in the Google X building, which is the old Mayfield Mall in Mountain View. I used to shop at that mall in the 1970s!

X is full of hardware startups, and when I started there I noticed one thing right away: for the first time in a while, I was not the oldest person in the building.

Now that we've moved to our own smaller building, I may be the oldest again, but not by a wide margin. There is a lot of gray hair in our teams.

I'm 67 and have been programming for 50 years.

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

#184

Post by hombre_fatal »

bumbledraven wrote: post #170
mixmastamyk wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meaning what?

Urban Dictionary is useful for looking up suggested meanings of colloquialisms. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mirin

What's funny is that it's already getting dated. I remember it was ubiquitous online in the forums I frequented in 2010 just like Urban Dictionary's graph shows. And that is already a decade ago (yikes)!

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

#185

Post by jackstraw14 »

antisemiotic wrote: post #114
commandlinefan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This doesn't work for me. It seems depressing as hell that we have to put in earplugs and pipe distracting media into our brains just to make work tolerable. How is cutting off one of our senses from our environment a solution?

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

#186

Post by blackflame7000 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #135
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…

Yeah, you hear all these horror stories about how developers have a "shelf life." In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. Look at any hobby -- say, guitar playing. The difference between someone who's been doing it for 4 years and someone who's been doing it 20 years is ridiculous. They're so much better. I feel…

> "mainframe technology well into the mid-aughts and never thought about learning anything new" - today this is called the cloud

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

#187

Post by zzzcpan »

PedroBatista wrote: post #125
bachmeier wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to nitpick on a couple of these: > brain "degradation" At 40? If you're suffering from loss of mental capabilities to the point that it affects your performance at work at 40 , you have medical issues that need immediate attention. > simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ) I've seen this stated many times, but nothing is forcing anyone to offer a particular salary or demand a parti…

Executive and working memory decline is a real thing that happens with age, I didn't say I'm demented to a point where I suck at my job, but I definitely felt a slight decrease from my 20's to my 30's. > I've seen this stated many times, but nothing is forcing anyone to offer a particular salary or demand a particular salary. I didn't think bosses& hiring managers trying to pay the minimum and get the maximum was a c…

> Executive and working memory decline is a real thing that happens with age

I thought that wasn't really supported by anything significant. Life, health getting in a way is not a decline of mental abilities.

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

#188

Post by blackflame7000 »

Stratoscope wrote: post #183
asdfman123 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you hear all these horror stories about how developers have a "shelf life." In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. Look at any hobby -- say, guitar playing. The difference between someone who's been doing it for 4 years and someone who's been doing it 20 years is ridiculous. They're so much better. I feel…

One thing I've noticed is that there seem to be a lot more older developers and engineers at hardware-oriented companies. I currently work at Wing Aviation, the Alphabet drone delivery company. We were originally located in the Google X building, which is the old Mayfield Mall in Mountain View. I used to shop at that mall in the 1970s! X is full of hardware startups, and when I started there I noticed one thing right…

That's probably not by coincidence. The cost required to fix a hardware/firmware defect vs a software defect is much more. I'd definitely want to put my best engineers on the product that can't be easily fixed once it's shipped vs software than can always be patched.

> I'm 67 and have been programming for 50 years.

Also, that's really impressive. You've probably forgotten more than I've ever learned!

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

#189

Post by ErikAugust »

PedroBatista wrote: post #172
ErikAugust wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the majority of people on those jobs." I'd love to give you a tour of what people do for work, and then you can personally decide how bad programming is as a profession.

Funnily enough, there's a good chance I know more about it than you. I just don't use other people's tremendous shitty jobs to glorify mine.

This is obviously a wild assumption, but you seem to have made up your mind. Good day.

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

#190

Post by ohyes »

sokoloff wrote: post #130
bachmeier wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to nitpick on a couple of these: > brain "degradation" At 40? If you're suffering from loss of mental capabilities to the point that it affects your performance at work at 40 , you have medical issues that need immediate attention. > simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ) I've seen this stated many times, but nothing is forcing anyone to offer a particular salary or demand a parti…

Not sure that I agree on the first point. In my 20s, I could easily work 12 hour days, keep tons of complex state in my head, and almost never walked into a room and wondered why I went there (both literally and in the programming metaphorical equivalent). In my 40s, much of that has changed. I'm beat mentally after a 6-7 hour day of coding. I can only keep smaller portions of the system in my head easily. It's possi…

I'm mid 30s, and if anything I can keep more of the code in my head than when i was in my 20s. My abstractions got better, and I've seen lots of stuff before, I think this has had the effect of compressing everything.

I think of all the edge cases and pitfalls that I wouldn't have in my 20s. I have an easier time reading and understanding documentation, using libraries, reading and understanding other people's code. I think I'm also much more sympathetic to the poor sod who wrote this broken code under a time crunch 5 years ago.

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