Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aging programmer

world.hey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 375 posts

Re: Aging programmer

#131

Post by GartzenDeHaes »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #73
rickreynoldssf wrote: post #65

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 share this frustration, but I think the root cause of the frustration is the difference between what I feel should be important, and what actually is important to people. Getting great reliable software delivered quickly, which is easy to maintain and change, should be the goal, I feel. But if that’s the case, why do people invent problems to find solutions to, why do people spend multiple days a week in Scrum meet…

In medium and large organizations, manager pay and influence is mostly related to the number of employees managed and the size of their budget. Managers maximizing these two variables explains a lot of behavior that seems unreasonable to employees.

Re: Aging programmer

#132

Post by scarface74 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #110
scarface74 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t randomly submit my resume to get into a FAANG at 45. When the recruiter reached out to me about an SWE position (that I wasn’t interested in). I kept talking to her and she directed me to a related remote job that I was interested in (cloud consulting - enterprise app dev/cloud architect).

> the recruiter reached out to me about an SWE position (that I wasn’t interested in) Then it's your preference not to be a programmer. My point was that it's also possible to be a SWE for those who still dig programming at our age. But you have to play by the rules. That being said, I don't think I'll last in such a position until retirement.

I spend everyday “programming” doing the same type of work I did before joining - mostly back end APIs, ETL, occasional front end work if I have to etc.

I just knew I wouldn’t enjoy being a small part of a large team coming from small companies where I could work up and down the life cycle from pre-sales, to requirement gathering, to implementation, to DevOps [sic], UAT and training.

I’m still part of a huge organization in the grand scheme of things. But my projects range from me the sole tech person doing everything to my working with a team where I lead or implement one “work stream” depending on the size of the project.

Re: Aging programmer

#133

Post by draw_down »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #56
dijit wrote: post #2

Here’s something I think a lot of people don’t think on: 40 years old is mid-career. If you expect to retire at 60 (likely 65 these days) and you start working at 20: 40 is smack dab in the middle of your career. I think that notion gets lost when we talk about ageism in tech and then people talk about 40-somethings.

> ageism in tech Several reasons for ageism sometimes missed. This from someone whose been discriminated against, who has hired, who now owns a company & who was also a recruiter. __I don't agree with this__ just laying the reasons out for clarity sake: - Hiring managers don't consider themselves ageist, but opt for younger employees whom they think make a better cultural fit. You can blame the 'work is my social lif…

No post body was provided.

Re: Aging programmer

#134

Post by indymike »

hoosieree wrote: post #40
temporallobe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my 20+ year career, I have met very few programmers who can actually justify the claim of being full-stack. Usually it means strong back-end that happens to have worked with some front-end framework fad, and less often vice versa. Specialists (UI/UX, database admins, CI/CD engineers, automation testers, just to name a few) are still very much needed and the trend to make everybody on the team “full-stack” doesn’t…

I have worked on ASICs, FPGAs, compilers, routers, clusters, servers, websites and mobile apps. But I would not describe myself as a "full-stack developer". To me that implies a very specific thing - a RDBMS backend coupled to heavyweight javascript framework frontend.

May I steal this description of "full-stack developer": a RDBMS backend coupled to heavyweight javascript framework frontend

Re: Aging programmer

#135

Post by lifeisstillgood »

So this is the (current) opening paragraph for my book:

############

There is a common refrain in large companies, almost a badge of honour.::

  "I used to write software, but then I became a manager and
  stopped. But I am still technical."
How many of these managers used to read and write English (or Spanish or Japanese) , and how many, once they became managers, stopped? But are still literate?

It is no longer possible to manage a company without reading and writing English (or Spanish or Japanese) But it is possible to do so without reading or writing code.

This book believes that it will soon be just as impossible to run a company without reading (and writing) code as it currently is to do so without English (or Spanish or Japanese).

All companies will be use software to gain what advantages in what military term "tempo of decision making contests"

This I call software literacy.

#############

The reason we old farts are upset is that there is an artificial divide between coding and the resource allocation and co-ordination of "management".

We need to focus on closing that gap - then coding is how we express most functions of "management".

Re: Aging programmer

#136

Post by neogodless »

dahart wrote: post #75

> 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…

Having done it very little, I'm no expert, but the situation I was in was that I was motivated but not knowledgeable, and I was paired with someone knowledgeable but wholly unmotivated. It let me be much more productive than otherwise, and put to use the other's experience without requiring them to find motivation.

Of course, if you're managing, and you know someone is not motivated, you probably don't turn to this as your solution, but I'm not management, so I could be wrong!

Re: Aging programmer

#137

Post by jv22222 »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #113
samatman wrote: post #103

Donald Knuth was 40 years old when he published the first version of TeX. We could make a long list like this. Enormous amounts of high-quality, game-changing software is written by coders in their 40s and 50s, often with a couple more decades of stewardship and expansion of their works.

Isn't unique to programming either. Loads of famous people produced something well known today in their later years. Many of which didn't start picking up the required skills before their late 20s, 30s, etc. Many works which in many ways, were far more difficult than programming is today. It's primarily navigating social environments which makes software production so obscenely difficult. There's nothing inherently c…

> coworkers heavily in favor of slowing things down through unnecessary red tape

This happens a lot. I wonder what the root cause of this is.

Re: Aging programmer

#138

Post by milesvp »

StevePerkins wrote: post #97

I'm approaching 50. Just a scant decade away from being old enough to tap my retirement accounts and have the OPTION to retire. These next couple of years look like they might not be fun, but overall it looks like I'm actually going to make it. For most of my career, I've been told (and I believed) that I would probably get forced out of a hands-on individual contributor role as I aged. During the late-2000's, I even…

The number I saw was something like every 5 years the number of programmers doubles. So half if all devs have less than 5 years experience. And since most new devs are more likely to be closer to college age than retirement age devs tend to skew younger than 40 (probably by a lot).

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html

Re: Aging programmer

#139

Post by treespace8 »

tartoran wrote: post #48
therealdokks wrote: post #33

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

That just isn't true in my case. I started my career in the late 90s and was the young kid at the office. So on my network is full of older developers.

Very few of them have been pushed out of the field. Yes many moved up, but the majority still code. The ones who had not moved into management are either retired (Over 65), retired early (Rich, big payday) or dead.

Re: Aging programmer

#140

Post by grahamm »

beej71 wrote: post #94

I found I lost interest in vapid work. Programming is still fun, but it's a big challenge to find a job that is fulfilling. When I was younger, I'd work on whatever. Then everything started sounding like yet another get rich quick company, and is that what I was giving up my life for? Just to move little green pieces of paper around? The most appealing thing I'd seen recently was a company that wrote software to help…

I agree, programming is still fun. Problem is my job has changed due to my age and experience and has migrated into something I don't want to do or can't do that well, managing others and the project as a whole. I get to do less of what I do and what I do well.
Post reply on HN