Can we have a blog with your programming / life adventures?
Also, it would be wise to name it "genedangelo in byteland" haha! ^_^
Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
171–180 of 555 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#172In my company, we can get "Senior Developer" title after 3 to 4 year experience. What your current title?
Real senior developers with lots of experience are usually shown the finger in our industry. There’s no such title to reflect 57 years of experience; i’ve heard it unofficially refered as baggage
Sadly that is a very common situation. Thus even more fitting to celebrate those who are still working, learning and enjoying their programming careers.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#173given the numerous posts about age discrimination on hn, i'm delighted to hear your story and wish you many more years of happy programming. as a whipper-snapper 40-something developer, it gives me hope and motivation.
The industry is backwards. Would you rather have a 25-year-old plumber, architect, photographer, chef, or a 50-year-old one? Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that's left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by "taste". Taste gets better with experience. A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve J…
I think current gigs want younger people not for their performance but their „price”. They work overtime without payment, are relatively cheap and you need alot of them. For every architect you have in the company there are like 20-30 developers of lower grade. So the demand for „design making” people is just not there.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#174Curious what is your salary? Can you share?
The salary curve along the career is as well interesting - is it always increasing, or having some drops?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#175Keep it up! "Retirement" is a fancy way of saying "a slow decline by idleness." I believe it's often work that keeps us from falling apart.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#176Respect! I've only been programming since approx 1979. I still remember the first time that I saw internet technology used in 1982 - transferring a file from the US to the Uni of Leeds in the UK. I also have no plans to stop although I have retired from full-time employment. Now just a hobbyist, who programs every few days, at my own pace and on my own projects.
Here's my own thought. My last place of work did a lot of research into teaching and simulation tech, and was heavily pushing AR / VR solutions from a disruptor perspective. Some of the theoreticians were heavily into their generation X/Y/Z perspectives and made a lot the advantages that young people would have as 'digital natives'.
As someone who'd been using computers since before they were born, I was quietly amused as being characterised as someone who couldn't properly understand tech because I didn't program until I was age 17/18. It could be argued that many modern digital natives are really the locked-in inhabitants of digital cities and walled gardens. I now characterise myself as a sort of 'digital settler' who in retrospect could be viewed as a pioneer on the digital frontier (although this is not how I perceived it in the early 80s when I was learning Pascal and then C on DEC, Amdhal and Vaxen).
I think my message for people who want to stay involved with the tech is to decouple their enjoyment of it from their career aspirations. Of course, YMMV!
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
She was a mathematician before that, though; probably about as close as you could get at the time :) But yeah, always vaguely thought she was younger starting.
Younger nothing, it's wild that I never stopped to consider that there was a (recent!) period where our whole professional field had to be invented out of thin air, scooping up willing academics as it went. Considering that ENIAC (along with the Von Neumann architecture) wasn't even a thing until 1945, to begin her career in 1944 is hardly late! :) (Aside, I wonder if recruiters in 1944 were already asking for ten ye…
> our whole professional field had to be invented out of thin air
"We shall need a great number of mathematicians of ability; there will probably be a good deal of work of this kind to be done" - Alan Turing, 1945.
You might find this talk by Bob Martin interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc - it's a history of programming that isn't the usual style, but instead about this growth into existance, increasing numbers of programmers, where they came from, and the effects that's had on the industry and on programming languages.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#178My grandpa is ~75, started programming professionally in his early 20s, and currently works as an engineer for the University of Utah, so my hunch is that there’s more people with 50+ years of software engineering experience than you might at first suspect. Either that or I just doxxed myself ;)
Oh yeah, I started at 12, now I'm 62, still working happily, I think the trick is to reinvent yourself every decade or so, find something completely different to do, it's a big field
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The industry is backwards. Would you rather have a 25-year-old plumber, architect, photographer, chef, or a 50-year-old one? Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that's left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by "taste". Taste gets better with experience. A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve J…
I think current gigs want younger people not for their performance but their „price”. They work overtime without payment, are relatively cheap and you need alot of them. For every architect you have in the company there are like 20-30 developers of lower grade. So the demand for „design making” people is just not there.
The industry has been very biased; from 1940 there weren't many programmers, very quickly the number of programmers doubled, most had little experience. Through the 1970s there weren't many programmers with more than 5 years experience. As the number grew so fast, through the 1980s most programmers still had less than 5 years experience. Same through the 1990s. Probably still the same through the 2000s and 2010s and with how many people are learning to code, probably still the same now, most programmers have That means most employers have only ever seen developers with <5 years experience, working in teams of same, using languages and tools designed by and for same. How could such employers properly value 30 or 50 years of experience?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#180Bob Smith who codes the NARS2000 APL interpreter was programming from at least 1969: