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Poll: How old are you?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: How old are you?

#71

Post by timr »

Interesting comparison from 1998:

http://slashdot.org/poll/421/My-Age-is

In 1998, 22% of respondents were ages 16-20, 53% were in their 20s, 15% in their 30s and 5% over 40.

As of this writing (and assuming that I did my arithmetic correctly), ~7% of respondents on this poll are ages 16-20, ~60% are in their 20s, ~25% in their 30s, and ~7% are over 40.

Obviously there are a lot of caveats here, but the slight increase in the overall age of techies between these two polls is nothing like you'd expect if everyone who started in their 20s in 1998 stuck around until today.

*edit: fixed arithmetic error. D'oh!

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#72

Post by agentultra »

alnayyir wrote: post #32
agentultra wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

22 and a career? Wow. Programming was still a hobby for me at that point. Still is. Sometimes wish I didn't spoil it by making it a career. ;) I feel old now. I started a record label at 22 and wanted to do nothing but music and party. Didn't get a "career" until a couple of years later when my record label burnt out and the parties stopped... Just remember to live a little. ;)

I've been programming since 8 or 11, depending on how strictly you measure it. (GW-Basic, then C) I've not really found work to spoil programming any more than any other bad job would. >Just remember to live a little ;) Just got back from a 3 week trip to SE Asia. I'm taking time for myself as I go. I was raised by the stereotypical protestant parents, so I've always been rather work minded. I'm intensely frugal as w…

That's great. And impressive. :)

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#73

Post by artmageddon »

I'll be 29 in a couple of months. Started programming in high school but didn't get really serious about it till college. Have been working professionally for 6 years. Overall I'm proud of what I've accomplished but after scouring this site for even my limited amount of time, I wonder if I've been slacking too much as I don't consider myself a senior developer. Some days I wonder if I'll feel like I'll ever reach that point, given just how much there is to know out there.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#74

Post by alnayyir »

agentultra wrote: post #72
alnayyir wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming since 8 or 11, depending on how strictly you measure it. (GW-Basic, then C) I've not really found work to spoil programming any more than any other bad job would. >Just remember to live a little ;) Just got back from a 3 week trip to SE Asia. I'm taking time for myself as I go. I was raised by the stereotypical protestant parents, so I've always been rather work minded. I'm intensely frugal as w…

That's great. And impressive. :)

It was unnecessarily intense and left me a very precocious child who was always lonely.

I would never subject my (potential) children to my childhood.

It gave me a boost in my career and programming, but that's nothing that can't be overcome with a marginal gap in work ethic.

That said, I was very fortunate to be able to crawl out of the lower classes.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#75

Post by mnwcsult »

56-60 Senior Software Engineer, still enjoying coding, hacking and figuring things out. Don't spend much energy on the good ole days, whatever they were. Still prefer C over everything else. Question: What is the best programming language? Answer: Whatever the client was sold on at the trade show. Wrote a really nice bash shell web scraper yesterday. Amazing to still get so much mileage out of sed,awk,grep, and others. All I did was setup a windows share and mounted the filesystem in ubuntu. I like the idea that there are so any platforms around and no one way to do anything. Tonight Labview and robot vision to do line following.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#76

Post by Swaggapotamus »

agentultra wrote: post #27
alnayyir wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

22 and 4-5 years into my career. I can only hazard a guess at what I'll be doing in 20 years.

22 and a career? Wow. Programming was still a hobby for me at that point. Still is. Sometimes wish I didn't spoil it by making it a career. ;) I feel old now. I started a record label at 22 and wanted to do nothing but music and party. Didn't get a "career" until a couple of years later when my record label burnt out and the parties stopped... Just remember to live a little. ;)

Glad to hear I'm not the only one to do it as a hobby in their twenties. I'm 21 now, about to graduate from college with a Creative Writing degree of all things, and only started programming about a month ago. I just had an idea for a project, and started teaching myself how to do it. I'm surprised by how much fun it is, despite the challenges, and how many hours I've wound up programming every day since I started. (I also feel really lucky to have tools like Stack Overflow to help me out as a beginner.)

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#78

Post by aerique »

rh32010 wrote: post #62

I am 22 and still absorbing lisp, currently running through "ANSI Common Lisp" and learning how I can apply this language to potentially my own startup. Only been visiting ycombinator for a week now and I already love it! So much information that is useful. Finally registered today.

Darn, that was supposed to be an upvote :-|

HN really needs a way to correct votes. The arrows are hideously small on an iPhone.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#80

Post by jaxn »

alnayyir wrote: post #51
jaxn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah the idealism of youth... Possibly. The odds are pretty bad for retirement at 40 though. Seems to be those who are successful / lucky enough to exit (making an assumption about your retirement plan), are also the kind of people that tend to just start another company or be an involved smart-money investor. I used to think I would retire. I have enough mostly-passive income to live on, but here I am doing another st…

Not really idealism. When you get an engineer's salary and sock away ~60-70% of it, your options are pretty rosy. The entrepreneurial bug and divorce are the only things I foresee really jeopardizing that. That or being seriously fertile. Hard tellin'. I'll be happy either way, and regardless of whether or not I'm getting paid, I'll code 'til I die.

I am not saying you won't be financially able to retire. The money is almost the easy part.
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