In my company, we can get "Senior Developer" title after 3 to 4 year experience. What your current title?
methusalem, god of code :-)
Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
101–110 of 555 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#102you remember my Father. Worked for IBM in the end of 60s, worked as COBOL developer, then went the whole process until become Territory manager from IBM and after retirement, got a second master in Quality assurance testing, and now in the age of 75 got, this week, his Scrum master certification and spend his day busy with python :)
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#103In an interview Bill Gates said he likes TypeScript. It was about a year ago. Sure he’s not a full time programmer but something tells me the itch will always be there for us the curious! :)
I am so reluctant to accept Microsoft in ECMA, and I have no idea why but I'm even more reluctant to after hearing this.
I mean - sure. I love Gates and all. But things like the Win32 API make me so weary to ever trust his opinion as a SWE. His technical "blessing" on anything doesn't mean much IMO.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#104Wow! I appreciate all the interest and feedback - quite unexpected. I'm glad I found HN. I'll try to add more responses tomorrow.
(I'm a moderator here. Welcome to HN!) Because you're likely to get a flood of comments and questions overnight, I've switched an alpha feature on for your account that will highlight new comments that have appeared since you last viewed the page. They'll show up with a colored bar to the left of the comment. The feature doesn't work perfectly yet, but hopefully it'll help you keep track of what's been posted since you last looked. Note that the colored bars will disappear each time you refresh the page.
Good luck and thanks for a great post!
(Anyone else who'd like this alpha feature turned on for their account is welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to.)
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#105[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#106Fist bump.
Congrats on an awesome career. You are an inspiration. Slice up fulfillment data in Fortran II before rules and drama -- legit. What are the younger programmers doing wrong? (I don't think we are much quicker - at anything). Also #1 on hacker news.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#107Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#108That's a lot of typing, over 57 years. How did you avoid RSI, carpal tunnel, and other injuries / health problems related to programming for this long?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#109Even if not the longest-serving, you're definitely quite high on the list. Thanks for sharing your story!
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 52 and am just starting to look around. Given that I primarily want world-wide remote (I live in Japan), it may be a tad difficult. However, I had no trouble at all attracting interest in my mid 40's when I went to London for a couple of years. It took me less than a month to land a job and I had a couple of options. My biggest piece of advice to anyone who wants a long technical career is to keep learning new th…
So what are the MFC experts doing nowadays? Anyway that's precisely the problem - either get sucked into all the horrible fads or not finding a job. That's a pretty bad choice.
Learn just enough about the fads so you can hold a conversation about them, but don't invest heavily in every one of them. You don't need to tech hop every year - give things at least a couple years to shake out. This will let you skip a lot of the time wasting BS that comes with fad driven development.