Aging programmer

I'm 60. I've been writing software since 1983.

For 25 years, in between, I was a manager. At one point, I progressed in my career, until I only managed, and did no coding (for money).

So I coded on the side. That's a big reason for all the open-source stuff that I have in my portfolio[0].

When I was told that the software industry has no use for old coders, I took my toys and went home. I was kind of butthurt.

But then, I've come to really, really like not having people interfering with my work, treating me with disrespect, and, worst of all, trashing my work.

So it's all good.

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away

As someone who is very “certified” when it comes to cloud, I can tell you that certifications mean absolutely nothing and can easily be gamed. I went through the certifications route only as a guided learning path so I would know what I didn’t know. Anyone can pass a multiple choice certification. I got my first AWS certification without ever logging in to AWS.

But it was never to get a job or a promotion. I was already the Dev lead at the company working on an on prem system and they wanted to “move to the cloud”. I just wanted to get an overview of the landscape.

As far back as 2000, “brain dumps” of MS certifications were a thing.

I think more people would choose the IC path of there were more authority and autonomy in it.

I’ve gone the management route because I like making larger product decisions (or at least being involved in them). ICs at any level rarely get that level kind of input.

I low key blame the onslaught of product management for software as the problem. It’s pulled all the fun product stuff out of engineers hands. :(

I hope that ageism dies out. I'm in my mid twenties and I would like to start a business down the line and if I'm able to make it happen, I would like to help with this issue.

I previously worked at a startup where the head of the SWE department was in his 60s, and it was one of the best places I had ever worked at. The startup regularly employed older programmers and I learned so much from them and hearing the lore of when they were young was also fun.

> almost no one wants to take a chance trying to develop a new way to interview.

I'm guessing your in the under 40 camp, but interviews did used to be better.

In the early days of the startup explosion interviews where much better. The biggest signal at the time was having an active github profile or otherwise existing portfolio of code. The strongest signal back then was serious contribution to any open source projects (strangely today that almost seems to count against you). It also wasn't required that you had these, but they were a very strong signal.

Interviews were largely technical conversations, to see if you understood the concepts, and even more importantly, it was okay if you didn't know. I remember being asked a question about TCP vs UDP. I didn't know much networking at the time, and explained what I knew about TCP but admitted my understanding of UDP was basically non-existent (admitting ignorance used to be a huge plus back then). The interviewers then explained how it worked and asked if I could explain when and why this would make for a better solution than TCP. I answered about the obvious application to media streaming and passed. Interviewers didn't care that you knew everything, they wanted to see how you think.

Even the original predecessor to our current leetcode nightmare, fizzbuzz, was never supposed to hard it was meant as a basic sanity check. There were some devs who had just followed the flow at some big bank and literally couldn't code on their own. Fizzbuzz was just to make sure that given a blank page you could implement basic code.

Of course as tech started to boom, so did the bootcamp/interview industry. People were trained to do fizzbuzz, instructed how to create a github repo filled with meaningless, half started project (or forks of other projects), and people where told how to flood OSS projects with minor pull requests so they could claim to be contributors. Then companies wanted to be like Google and have hard white board challenges.

Then you had a generation of engineers that never knew any different and largely had forgotten (or never known) how to assess technical competency anyway than through a series of hazing rituals.