121–130 of 375 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Limiting a software engineers career to less than 20 years is a pretty fucking idiotic thing to do.
Sure. Ageism, sexism, racism, etc, etc, etc, are all fucking idiotic. And yet surprisingly popular. So we have to deal with them.
this is the one thing you said I disagree with, unless you mean dealing with it by eliminating it.
> I don't enjoy switching contexts. My perfect agenda is composed of a single meaty task I can focus on for days. So large companies only?
I wonder where the genesis is of this idea that programming is young person's game akin to physical sports where speed, explosiveness and endurance matter. It seems to me that it's an intellectual activity where one should go on for very long honing their skills and becoming better and better at it with age. Maybe the industry sidelines the older more experienced technical folks at a cost, and that's why there seems…
Maybe because a 25 year old can work 12 hours a day, while a 40 year old often has family obligations that make that impossible.
51 grey beard here. Let me complain about the younguns. So much of what's out there today is, or is based on "solutions" created to solve problems that don't really exist. Rather than try to understand something so many engineers created "frameworks" to implement what was already there. Like 90% of current web stacks are just that. But new engineers are trained on that stuff and think it's the only way. That frustrat…
I sort of know what you are saying. Being dealing with so-called "server-side rendering" v.s. "static generated" recently, and these feel old / boring. It has been 15 years and mostly the same thing reinvented. However, it is not a negatively thing. We may be able to setup IIS / Apache with Squid two decades ago to do similar things. The bar to do it now is much lower, and the tooling to help achieve that is much bet…
> I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero. […] Related: working with people you can learn from is a wonderful source of motivation. […] My desire to discuss technical stuff with people, both to help and be helped, is at all-time highs. FWIW pair programming is very hard to do well and usually pretty uncomfortable. It needs to be structured well and done in smaller dose…
40 years old is aging/old?! That was more than a decade ago for me and I definitely didn’t feel aged at the time. I still spend all my time as an individual contributor. Their have been efforts to move me into more senior/management roles and I have refused them all. I know my strengths and working with people isn’t one of them.
I graduated six months ago at 31 and am not starting my career as a junior at 32.
Even to this day, I have never been hired after being interviewed by a youngster. I suspect karma might be a thing, so I just endure them all knowing little shits for 30-60 minutes and move on.
I don't speak for my company, but in my opinion they still get more value from me, net, as a non-manager than they would as a manager. I also think some of the most valuable work I do is not in the code I write or the systems I build myself, but rather in the guidance I can give junior developers on the things they build, and the way they approach their careers. If I get can someone in her 20's or 30's to adopt a use…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm as a 53 year old programmer I've had the exact opposite experience. Because of the large diversity of my skills I have more offers for work than ever before.
You’re the odd one out, perhaps due to your own abilities and other special qualities. For the average programmer ageism applies though. And the largest majority of devs is in the average region
It's easy to blame ageism, and ageism is real. There are a lot of people who really resent older people and believe flat-out untrue myths about cognition, value of experience and work ethic. That said, every time a friend shares a beer with me and tells me the woes of trying to get a job when older, I hear this:
I can't get a job that pays me like I'm senior, but requires the skills of someone half my age.
The solution is to break out of that box, and either be ok with lower pay, or go for jobs that leverage the value of your experience.
> perhaps due to your own abilities and other special qualities
I'm sure if you looked at yourself, or maybe had someone look with you, that you'd find you have quite a bit to offer when it comes to ability, and especially special qualities. As you get older it's hard to understand what is special because you've seen a lot, and it all seems average.
> I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero. […] Related: working with people you can learn from is a wonderful source of motivation. […] My desire to discuss technical stuff with people, both to help and be helped, is at all-time highs. FWIW pair programming is very hard to do well and usually pretty uncomfortable. It needs to be structured well and done in smaller dose…
Either you're both at the same level, and you can feed off each other, thinking through edge cases and bugs as you go. Or you could be at different levels, where one engineer is teaching, and the other is learning. It's really a win-win in my opinion.