51–60 of 73 posts
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It is an uninsightful thought at best and an ad personam argument at worst.
Lets look to the article itself for 'uninsightful'? '5 Pervasive myths' indeed - the article actually supports all five, and all five are in fact true. - old guy
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This is a very good point. 'Thinking more slowly' isn't a problem in any other field. I think that in software development, a lot of the time, 'thinking more slowly' with age is actually thinking more carefully. You have more experience, therefore you have a larger knowledge base; so of course it takes longer to query. It also means that you get better answers, rather than the first answer that pops into your head. A…
I think perhaps the best way to answer how to stay mentally active with the question, posed to me, that got it through my own head. Start by asking yourself this question: Why do you think that time seems to speed up as we get older? Now stop, and really think about that question. Don't skip ahead. Think of some possible reasons. It's a phenomenon that we all experience. What's the cause? When we are preschool age, t…
My theory: because each unit of time is a smaller relative percentage of our existence to date.
For example, to a 5-yr-old, one year is 20% of their lifespan, and seems to last a loong time. But to a 50-yr-old, one year is only 2% of their lifespan, and flies by.
The thing is, when you're older, there's really no way to reach the younger generation. They aren't listening to you because you're older, for the most part, and they've been listening to their "out of touch" parents their whole lives. They won't understand until their your age, and then they'll have to deal with another younger generation. This isn't a criticism of anyone, just my obeservation about why there is a g…
٭) The app's controls look simple and grayish like in Windows 2K. No color effects. No translucency. No skinning. This is an app that 30 people use on a daily basis and it makes an effort to let them do things fast and accurate with the least chance of surprise and/or annoyance. No user of the app has complained to me yet about the lack of eye candy.
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> You know that feeling when you drive home and don't remember driving home or > anything along the way? Boom. There you go. Your brain just ignored the trip. That's your brain entering a sleep state, and it's dangerous. Counter this by constantly sweeping your eyes across the road to stay alert. I like everything else you wrote, but as a driver, motorcyclist, bicyclist, and pedestrian, I hate to think that people wo…
That's not a sleep state. That is a form of disassociation.
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> You know that feeling when you drive home and don't remember driving home or > anything along the way? Boom. There you go. Your brain just ignored the trip. That's your brain entering a sleep state, and it's dangerous. Counter this by constantly sweeping your eyes across the road to stay alert. I like everything else you wrote, but as a driver, motorcyclist, bicyclist, and pedestrian, I hate to think that people wo…
Not optimized, ignored. Two completely different things.
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I think perhaps the best way to answer how to stay mentally active with the question, posed to me, that got it through my own head. Start by asking yourself this question: Why do you think that time seems to speed up as we get older? Now stop, and really think about that question. Don't skip ahead. Think of some possible reasons. It's a phenomenon that we all experience. What's the cause? When we are preschool age, t…
> Why do you think that time seems to speed up as we get older? My theory: because each unit of time is a smaller relative percentage of our existence to date. For example, to a 5-yr-old, one year is 20% of their lifespan, and seems to last a loong time. But to a 50-yr-old, one year is only 2% of their lifespan, and flies by.
It's probably because the brain gets worse at encoding memories as it ages, so fewer memories/unit time = faster time perception. Also, older people have slower cognitive tempo than younger people.
From anecdotal evidence I will put forward another theory. Because CS and programming are relatively new and rapidly growing fields a large number of programmers in the early years were random office workers who could type, press ganged into development duties. Education started to catch up in the 80s and 90s so young kids with a real grounding in fundamentals were coming into organizations staffed with older develop…
I can't comment about middle America banking, but this was definitely NOT the case in Silicon Valley. People who became programmers were extremely bright and a very diverse lot. A significant number were accomplished musicians. A lot from mathematics and engineering. I even worked with a guy who dropped out of physics because programming was personally more rewarding than being yet another post-doc at Fermi Lab. My a…
Neuroscientists found that:
* Longitudinal studies shows cognitive skills peak at middle age.
* Older people are happier. As one ages, they become calmer, more positive, and being able to regular them emotion better.
* The amount of white matter in the brain, myelin, continue to increase well into middle age. (i.e. better brain function)
* Older people are using both hemispheres of the brain to handle complex task, a phenomenon known as bilateralization. This is linked to higher cognitive ability.
http://tungwaiyip.info/blog/2010/10/29/secret_life_of_the_gr...
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This is a very good point. 'Thinking more slowly' isn't a problem in any other field. I think that in software development, a lot of the time, 'thinking more slowly' with age is actually thinking more carefully. You have more experience, therefore you have a larger knowledge base; so of course it takes longer to query. It also means that you get better answers, rather than the first answer that pops into your head. A…
I think perhaps the best way to answer how to stay mentally active with the question, posed to me, that got it through my own head. Start by asking yourself this question: Why do you think that time seems to speed up as we get older? Now stop, and really think about that question. Don't skip ahead. Think of some possible reasons. It's a phenomenon that we all experience. What's the cause? When we are preschool age, t…
Damn. I’m officially cursed then; recent diagnosis of depression here due to midlife business failure. sigh
The thing is, when you're older, there's really no way to reach the younger generation. They aren't listening to you because you're older, for the most part, and they've been listening to their "out of touch" parents their whole lives. They won't understand until their your age, and then they'll have to deal with another younger generation. This isn't a criticism of anyone, just my obeservation about why there is a g…
I've had lots of older mentors in my life, and they treated me like their equal. This is a distinct contrast to older people who just take the opportunity to lecture and judge.
"You won't understand until you're older" is a sterling example of how to ensure no young person will listen to you -- it's inherently disrespectful, and shows you are concerned less with communicating than affirming your own special-ness.
Maybe it's you.
(When I was in middle school, I befriended my librarian, taught her HTML, which led to me teaching whole classes of librarians and meeting the library sciences executive for the entire county. She became a friend. Once she told me in typical frankness, "I wish I hadn't given so much to this job. A job will never love you back." Do you think I ignored her, figuring that I knew better? She never once told me "you can't understand until you're older." Because she was a true mentor, and that's a cop-out.)