I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 • Hacker News Board

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#571

Post by rumanator » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 10:54 AM UTC

RobertKerans wrote: post #561

rumanator wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that "ok boomer" is supposed to be dismissive of opinions and personal assertions based exclusively on age is a red herring. It makes as much sense as asserting that the "Karen" meme is dismissive of women. That was never the point, was it? The "ok boomer" meme is dismissive of ideas that are forced onto others based on absurd appeals to authority and in spite of their lack any substance or support or ration…

Sure, that's the original context. It's just that "ok boomer" is very often used to dismiss an older person [older than the person responding] asking someone to do anything (or giving advice in anything). Just as "Karen" is very often just a coded "bitch", used when an woman [older than the person responding] asks someone to do anything

It's extremely disingenuous to try to assert that the "ok boomer" meme is used to dismiss questions or requests or opinions made by older people, or that the "karen" meme is used to dismiss questions or requests made by women. Its in fact a gross misrepresentation of what those memes are and have always been.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#572

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 11:38 AM UTC

dxy3 wrote: post #547

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that. Thanks for sharing it. I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately , and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in t…

Some ideas (from a guy in his 40s who interviews every 6 to 12 months for high paying short-term project work): - 25 years at a single company is working against you. Remove all that from your cv and just list the recent stuff you built. - Most of your cv should be description of the repos with links. Cut out and summarise past experience ruthlessly, like you’re refactoring someone else’s old code. - Remove the link…

Thanks!

Well, the long-term work is staying in the CV. I worked for 27 years at one of the most storied and respected Japanese corporations on Earth, at a very deep level. This says a lot about my aptitude, ethics, Honor, Integrity, team dynamics and loyalty. I sure as heck don't want to work for any company that thinks of that as a bad thing. Most of my tech work has been done in the open. I've been doing open-source work for over twenty years; which gives me the advantage of a vast portfolio.

I was a hiring manager for 25 years. Hiring people was a very important part of my work. I managed a small, high-functioning team that did image pipeline "engine" code in C++. Getting headcount was a huge battle, and I kept employees for decades. I loved multi-page CVs. "Draw Spunky" tests were absolutely worthless in evaluating people that would become part of my team. Interviews were often very casual affairs, where I'd encourage people to tell me stories about their work.

I have a Stack Overflow story that lays out my work in a linear fashion[0], or CV fashion[1]. I kind of like the idea of an SO story. It's fairly direct in pointing to my work.

My experience is that the vast portfolio is ignored by hiring managers (recruiters are much, much worse). I used to send links to relevant projects, when applying, only to have them completely ignored, in favor of a 50-line binary tree test. I have come to realize that binary tree tests are "young pass filters," as the only place binary trees actually exist, are in colleges. If a company gives a binary tree test, then I know they aren't interested in me, and are just ticking an "Interviewed old fart" checkbox.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#573

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 11:41 AM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #540

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that. Thanks for sharing it. I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately , and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in t…

I could offer an alternative perspective on this as I’ve seen it done to a lot of people that haven’t much choice in the matter. It’s entirely possible you’re not getting offers because they know you don’t need them. I don’t mean to say they’re wanting to give the offers to less fortunate applicants - it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money. “We need you to work…

That's a good point, and a relevant one.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#574

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 11:48 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #531

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that. Thanks for sharing it. I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately , and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in t…

It's not just age-ism about people, the same prejudices are also applied against software. I'm currently #1 in "clean EPE matched" on the Sintel AI benchmark - by re-implementing a 2006 paper. I'm taking advantage of the additional computing power that we have nowadays by brute-forcing what used to be a gradient-descent solver. It appears that people have re-invented the AI wheel many times, but nobody checked to see…

The other side of this, is that we are living in a "dependencyshpere," where people can't build projects on their own. This is a bit jarring to me. My first computer was an MC6800 STD Bus board, screwed onto a piece of wood, with a hex keypad and an 8-digit LED readout. I got pretty used to knowing what was going on under the hood. I can't even imagine looping in a bunch of code without understanding what it will do.

Dependencies are great. They are how we can do huge things with small teams. They are also bad (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/).

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#575

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 11:51 AM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #548

zeroedsomewhere wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of income do you think young people should be saving? Because from what I see, this is the age of freely available personal finance advice, and more people seem to be following it at whichever age they stumble into stable income. Sure, there would be splurges here and there, but as far as I can tell, people are saving well. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/why-young-people-are-saving-... https://www.vo…

As much as you can in my opinion. I know someone who’s been saving 50+% of their income since they started their career 10–15 years ago (software engineer, well paid so they can afford to save that much, etc). As a result, they don’t take shit from anyone. They don’t have to. They can afford to say « no » to overtime and spend time with their family. They can afford to quit when it sucks too much with no hope of impr…

I just saved as much as I could. It usually ended up being around 40%.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#576

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 11:52 AM UTC

sqldba wrote: post #567

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends. I’m only interested in doing stuff I want to do; the way I want to do it. Most of that stuff is now water under the bridge. I’m pretty hesitant to get into the industry, in its current state. Not much fun to be had. I’m already committed to working on a nonprofit, but we’ll see how that develops.

“I only want to do what I want to do,” is pretty self-limiting. Not only does it cut off any way for you to grow, it makes it hard for companies to hire you over programmers willing to do anything. And I don’t mean that in a bad way but a realistic way - companies hire and want to keep you on but know you’re not going to be interested in any of their projects so the time investment has been wasted.

Bingo. See "not looking for work," above.

When I first left my job, I was insecure, and companies could have taken advantage of that.

No more.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#577

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

frogpelt wrote: post #470

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that. Thanks for sharing it. I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately , and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in t…

It's not just in tech. You hear responses from younger generations like "Ok Boomer" to their elders' opinions and it is so cringe-worthy. I don't think everything my parents taught me was perfect or even always correct but there's an irreplaceable amount of wisdom that comes from being alive twice as long.

The difference, these days, is social media. It acts as an accelerant to prejudice, recklessness, and disunity.

Disrespecting elders is a time-honored aspect of nature. Even critters have it (watch puppies and kittens ignoring their parents).

But puppies don't have a worldwide graph of other puppies that establish feedback loops to encourage each other to eat chocolate.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#578

Post by adamsea » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 12:33 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #398

war1025 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal mantra at work is: One useful thing per day. If I manage to do one useful thing every day, it adds up to a lot of useful things over time. And that has proven to be enough. There's a sort of mediocre Johnny Cash song with the chorus "Even I might get to Heaven at a half a mile a day" That's basically how I try to live my life.

The speed still matters somehow. Well, take Johnny Cash. Half a mile a day * 30k days gives 15k miles; maybe it's enough to reach heaven, but not enough to e.g. reach the Moon. So, when choosing to move steadily albeit slowly, you have to manage your expectations, and get used to get by with little. Investing your time is not unlike investing your money: least risky strategies bring most stable but least spectacular…

Quantifying a Johnny Cash song is just missing the point, IMHO :).

Plus, of course, there’s no fast road to Heaven - whatever Heaven May mean to you.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#579

Post by danielheath » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

giantDinosaur wrote: post #539

paloaltokid wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is entirely reasonable and correct, but it's also really just saying "suck it up". You bet it is. And the sooner you realize that most of life is this way the better off you will be.

Is this a reasonable perspective? What about the labour movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that in many cases were about balancing work with life? Adopting this perspective isn't great unless you want to accept the status quo.

> Adopting this perspective isn't great unless you want to accept the status quo

Adopting this perspective is the only way you're going to change the status quo. Change isn't created by endlessly scrolling or complaining on twitter; recognizing that you must be hardworking and focus your energy where it's most effective is a precondition to creating it.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#580

Post by kokey » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

voidhorse wrote: post #13

Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care…

I worked for a big multinational bank and was reasonably comfortable but sometimes not very busy and most of the usual online distractions was blocked except for hacker news. I spent so much time reading hacker news that it was probably a big influence in me deciding to quit my job to join a bootstrapped startup as a CTO. Also probably the biggest mistake of my life. In the aftermath I ended up working as a contractor in a remote office for a tech company to recover my finances. During that time I used to spend my afternoon coffee break reading a newsletter from Matt Levine and I think that's probably one of the primary influences that made me end up working in finance again.