Or, more optimistically, if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. I love programming too and have no plans on stopping either. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Programming is the thing you love the most and if it was 100% up to you what to do with your time you’d still do it? I mean I don’t hate my job but damn I’d just sit in front of the TV and go for walks if that was an option.
Yes, absolutely! Obviously there's other things I enjoy doing as well, but programming by far has the greatest impact on the world around me, and I love seeing the things I help create making other people's lives easier.
Continuing programming != continuing being an employee, working for others.
What's wrong with working for others? Similarly, what's the point of programming (or of any work, I suppose) if it isn't helping someone?
> What's wrong with working for others?
Nothing really.
I guess what the parent was getting at was that if you are an employee at a point of your life when society expects you to be retired, then you will not be able to allocate your free time as you see fit. In other words, working for others past retirement means you never really retire enough to indulge in things you never had time for in your prime, like spending quality time with one’s spouse for instance [0].
Personally I love programming, among other things that people might regard as similar to programming. The prospect of just sitting in front of TV and going for walks is horrifying. For short breaks, sure, that's really nice. For years? Horrifying. Solving technical problems is vastly more satisfying than that. It's like maths to a mathematician, physics to a physicist. Why would they ever stop, given freedom to carry…
Yep, the lockdown means I am at home all the time, so I started pulling out hardware to make things, programming the programs that always I was working on in the back of my head and finish writing the fan-fics I have going. The idea that you only do things because it is your job suggests a limited life, I remember when I was working telling the others about all the trips and cruises I did on my time off. When I asked…
Why is it wrong for me (or anyone) to get fulfillment out of their job? Thanks to my partner I do the traveling thing; I visit other countries, sample other cultures, and routinely try new things. I'm not averse to any of it, but I don't understand the appeal, much less (what I read as) the condescending attitude against people who don't do it. Why can't we just "live and let live", without judgement, even if others choose to live differently than ourselves?
Everyone likes different things. '1'+1=2 prevents a lot of errors. The languages tries to help you along compared to an harsh error. Maybe you want a harsh error.. halting everything until you declare a new variable with the same type and have to go through a manual conversion. For me let the language handle that. If you are tdding anything unexpected will be caught anyhow if you are worried how things convert. It's…
Implicit string to number conversion is more like C in terms of memory management, in the sense that it's a huge footgun that you will definitely shoot yourself with. I have never seen it prevent errors, only make them worse by hiding them from QA so they can reach production and ruin your weekend.
It's unfortunately in JS that + is used for both string concatenation and number addition. There are however defined rules that anything concatenated with a string becomes a string. And anything used with -/* > < becomes a number. As a beginner in JS I always used -- instead of plus when doing addition. But as I got more experienced I learned what was strings and what was numbers. And if I'm not sure I add an assertion - so that there will be an early error. I also parse all input (user input etc) not even a static strong type system will help you there, you always have to check/parse the input at runtime! JavaScript is strongly typed as in whatever the user inputs it will be converted to a type. JS don't have that many types and usually it becomes a string.
Life expectancy has plateaued and may be trending down in the U.S. The culprit is likely obesity. (See https://time.com/5100737/obesity-lowering-life-expectancy-un... )
google had a fair number of older programmers (like over 50) when I was there. they had a group for them, 'greygler', also gaygler (not positive of the spelling). google has a bunch of employee groups that are portmanteau's of something + google.
I believe that (the odious portmanteau) “greygler” is defined as being over 40.
I 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?
> Do you feel like you learned from your advisors, some if whom I'd imagine were younger than you?
Why do you think it'd be unusual to learn from someone younger than yourself?
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?
I'd be very curious too. My son's university is proposing to do the next year (mostly) remote, which sounds like a perfect way for me to go back for a couple of classes too. I always wanted more letters after my name.
> I always wanted more letters after my name.
This is a really bad reason to do a degree, if you want my unsolicited opinion.
Goals! As a mere 49-year-old who learned to code 38 years ago and only has 15 years' professional experience, it pisses me off to hear people whining about ageism in tech; I'm sure certain sectors of the hotshot startup world are biased towards "bright young things" but as far as I can tell there are many orgs that have a place for grizzled greybeards and I certainly don't plan to ever retire. What would I do? I'm still amazed every day that they pay me good money for doing the thing that has been my hobby since age 11, and even if I didn't need the money I'm sure it would continue to be one of my favourite hobbies that I would do just for fun.