43 years here
Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
231–240 of 555 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Partly cribbed from my comment downthread: I think I'd classify Knuth as the slightly different "longest working computer scientist". He's known for his quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." Or perhaps I'd classify him as the somewhat more sycophantic "longest working genius" or "longest working cool guy". Heck, Knuth was uniquely awarded a master's degree for his bach…
To be honest, it's a bit weird to judge a man on the basis of a joke he made over 40 years ago.
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Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#233I am 80 years old and still working full time in IT. Although I evolved from pure programming to project management and business analysis the past few years. Originally started out working at Cape Canaveral as a radar and telemetry engineer and moved into programming after I left there. Whenever I interview, I completely ignore the age issue. If the interviewer is to dumb to recognize the value of my knowledge and ex…
I am sorry, but you are not a programmer anymore. You are a project manager or a business analyst. The reason you are able to completely ignore the age issue is because there's no ageism in hiring business analysts and project managers. The ageism is visible in hiring programmers, which most certainly you are not. You might "dabble" in code outside of work in your own spare time, but that doesn't make you a professio…
"I am sorry, but you are not a programmer anymore"
Your gatekeeping is not welcome here. This isn't a competition.
"The reason you are able to completely ignore the age issue is because there's no ageism in hiring business analysts and project managers. The ageism is visible in hiring programmers, which most certainly you are not."
and your unfounded conclusions aren't welcome either.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#234My grandmother started working on adding machines at IBM right after college in 1939. She retired in the 1980s programming in Cobol for Nielsen Media Research. Her daughter, my mother, was also a programmer and married another. My father is still programming at 74, though I think he was 73 at his last paying job (doing audio classification with RNNs). All of their tenures are a few years shy of yours, but in aggregate it's competitive.
TL;DR everyone ancestor of mine born since 1916 has been a computer programmer.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#235First, thank you for sharing and welcome to HN! :)
Second, I want to take a moment to commemorate and celebrate my father, who enrolled at MIT in 1967, graduated w a Master's in CSEE, spent 25 years working at GenRad and continued working as a software engineer (at MathWorks) until the week before he passed away in early 2018. So he was a programmer for over 50 years. While I'm unlikely to reach that milestone (having started "late", a couple years after graduating college in 1996), my younger brother wrote his first program at age 5 and is still at it today (36 years and counting).
No particular point to make here, just reflecting on our chosen field and feeling very, very fortunate to be part of this community. Be well! :)
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#236I am 80 years old and still working full time in IT. Although I evolved from pure programming to project management and business analysis the past few years. Originally started out working at Cape Canaveral as a radar and telemetry engineer and moved into programming after I left there. Whenever I interview, I completely ignore the age issue. If the interviewer is to dumb to recognize the value of my knowledge and ex…
How did you go about getting your phd? Did you take a break from paid work to go to school? Did you work on your thesis nights/ weekends?
Do you feel like you learned from your advisors, some if whom I'd imagine were younger than you?
Did you study an area related to your work at the time? Or did you use it to learn a new area?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you consider what you do to be programming? How does it compare to, say, hand-writing C?
Surely he considers it programming if he self describes as an active programmer?
He might be doing other code work, as well.
I was honestly curious how it compared. What tools and processes transfer over, that kinb of thing.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#238Very impressive and significant!
My experience began on the Altair 8800 as a kid in my brothers' bedroom. Continued on personal computers to the present day. So maybe the longest (possible) PC experience, but I'm sure it's shared by many.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sorry, but you are not a programmer anymore. You are a project manager or a business analyst. The reason you are able to completely ignore the age issue is because there's no ageism in hiring business analysts and project managers. The ageism is visible in hiring programmers, which most certainly you are not. You might "dabble" in code outside of work in your own spare time, but that doesn't make you a professio…
"I am sorry, but you are not a programmer anymore" Your gatekeeping is not welcome here. This isn't a competition. "The reason you are able to completely ignore the age issue is because there's no ageism in hiring business analysts and project managers. The ageism is visible in hiring programmers, which most certainly you are not." and your unfounded conclusions aren't welcome either.
I am just 37 but find myself much more comfortable in management than writing code, compared to 27yo myself. I can't understand why you shame someone for pointing at true facts.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#240Knuth was being paid by Burroughs to implement an Algol-58 compiler in 1960. He’s still programming, and seems to have advice for others on the subject. But I don’t expect to see him here. Congratulations on being in that company, and may it long continue.
Partly cribbed from my comment downthread: I think I'd classify Knuth as the slightly different "longest working computer scientist". He's known for his quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." Or perhaps I'd classify him as the somewhat more sycophantic "longest working genius" or "longest working cool guy". Heck, Knuth was uniquely awarded a master's degree for his bach…
Anil Nerode is almost surely the oldest working computer scientist today - https://math.cornell.edu/anil-nerode - He technically is in the math department at Cornell but he has been there since well before Cornell had a computer science department.