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Aging programmer

world.hey.com

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Re: Aging programmer

#221

Post by weatherlite »

macrolime wrote: post #16
krmboya wrote: post #10

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.

I don't think that many millennials want to work 12 hours a day...

Re: Aging programmer

#222

Post by somenameforme »

Tryk wrote: post #214
somenameforme wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess is a primarily mental competition, but players at the top of the world tend to hit their peak at around 35 years old. Players can continue playing at an exceptionally high level until the end of their life, but on average there is a gradual downward slide from that peak. Magnus Carlsen, the current world champ and arguably strongest player of all time, has decided to simply stop defending his title (held since…

The reason Magnus is not defending his title has nothing to do with some decline in ability. Last game versus Nepomniachtchi he won quite convincingly 7.5 to 3.5. >“I feel I don’t have a lot to gain, I don’t particularly like [the championship matches], and although I’m sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I don’t have any inclination to play and I will simply not play the match,”…

For a man that loves winning and competing as much as Magnus I find it difficult to imagine he wouldn't be playing if he felt himself a significant favorite. His last opponent is a character with a well deserved reputation for implosion. He was playing no less worse than Magnus for 6 games, in a 12 game match. He then lost a single hard fought game and did his thing, blowing up and losing 3 of the next 5 games with abysmal (by his standards) play. That could happen again, but I think it unlikely and I'd say Magnus does as well. Nepo seems to have improved his mental game, and has been in great form as well - having just dominated a very strong field in the candidates with the highest score in modern times.

Carlsen is very strong, but his title defenses have never really reflected that - ironically with the most recent exception. In the two defenses prior, he only managed to draw the classical section and relied on tiebreaks. His defeat is all but inevitable, and I think he wanted to go out undefeated. I think the one opponent he was hoping to be able to play against was Alireza Firouzja. Alireza is young and will probably become a world champion contender at some point. But Magnus would have been able to count on Alireza collapsing under the unique pressures of a world championship match and let Magnus then go out on top having undefeated having defeated champions from 3 generations. Instead Alireza collapsed at the candidates, scoring less than 50% in spite of being the (at the time) 2nd highest rated player in the world.

Re: Aging programmer

#223

Post by twblalock »

JackMorgan wrote: post #165
twblalock wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, programmers are paid better than most people and early retirement is often possible. A lot of programmers don’t need to work into their 60s. In my own case, when I have enough money to retire it’s going to be hard to convince me to keep working.

I know quite a few engineers who simply no longer need to work ever again, and are working just for "funemployment".

I would probably try to do that too, but one bad week or month, and I'd be done.

Re: Aging programmer

#224

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

dominotw wrote: post #197
w4ffl35 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the thing that gets frustrating as i age are interviews and code challenges. i'd really prefer a certification that proves i can do xyz which i take once (per year? in my life?). then just decide if you like me based on personality and communication. i have over 200 repositories etc. its redundant, and random code challenges that differ from employer to employer prove next to nothing. 20 years ago it was the norm for…

I think Leetcoding is a worthy investment for career. Why not . I understand that it feels like its waste of time with no practical use but the upsides are that they make job hopping trival because you know what to expect and feel confident. I think its a tiny investment for big returns. unparalleled to any other activity you could invest your time in.

> unparalleled to any other activity you could invest your time in.

Huh. Never heard that before.

I invest my time in writing "shippable" code. Even my "farting around" projects are done in a manner as if they were to be released by a Fortune 50 company.

That means that Every. Single. Line. Of. Code. that I write is "ship" code. There are a number of projects that I've stopped working on (I archive them, but leave them out there), and a few that were never really meant to be sent out to fend for themselves, but I still make the effort to write tests and documentation for them.

I'm so used to delivering software, that I've almost forgotten what it was like to play around; which is actually a bit of a shame. It could easily be said that I "take things too seriously." I can tell you that my employers liked it, though.

My GH Activity Graph is solid green, and I wouldn't dream of "gaming" it. I don't especially care whether or not anyone thinks I'm "l33t." I'm an old fart that has no intention of working for anyone, ever again. I write code for myself, and that I want to see. Most of the folks that I care what they think of me, have no understanding of my tech work, and that's fine.

It makes me feel good to make good, well-tested, well-documented, well-architected code that solves problems.

I guess you could call me a "completionist." I like to finish stuff.

Re: Aging programmer

#225

Post by justrudd »

pyuser583 wrote: post #217
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…

I’ve seen a lot of older programmers. They can wind up working as a team of one because they’re productive enough to do the work of an entire team. I’ve seen this a lot. Hire older dev. Older dev has decades of experience. Older dev creates new product from scratch in a couple weeks. Another issue is that mentoring is focused on junior devs by senior (6-8 years of experience) devs. So you’re less likely to have a sen…

I’m kind of in this boat. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now (jeez). Mentoring a dev with 6 to 8 years experience is a pain in the butt (yes. I know. Not all of you).

While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question. So I’ll give them that as a starting point and tell them how I’d approach the solving the problem. But they get frustrated that I didn’t solve their problem immediately. That I can’t point them at a blog post of Stack Overflow answer.

But a dev with 1 to 3 years experience? They’ll take that non-answer and run with it.

And I get it. The 1 to 3 probably has 1 maybe 2 tasks they’re working on. The 6 to 10 (to 15) has probably a half dozen things they’ve got to keep track of. Researching is probably pretty low on their list.

Re: Aging programmer

#226

Post by underdeserver »

weatherlite wrote: post #221
macrolime wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that many millennials want to work 12 hours a day...

Some millennials are 40 years old now.

Re: Aging programmer

#227

Post by shrimpx »

I keep seeing people lamenting something to the tune of "Hey I'm in my 40s, aren't I supposed to be expired? But I'm more relevant than ever."

The idea that you're expired at 40 gained hold in the 90s and 00s when programmers entrenched in 80's style apps had a hard time keeping up with the explosive internet takeover of software. Waterfall development of monolithic apps with synchronous I/O and multithreading didn't carry over well to SaaS. It's also kinda like how mainframe people had a hard time with the PC revolution before that.

But if you were building LAMP websites in 2000, that experience still carries over to today.

If some idea takes over again that requires a total rethinking, like maybe differentiable programming with AI-generated infrastructure, then there'll be a bunch of 40-50 year olds who'll find it too difficult to rebuild themselves around a radically different paradigm.

Re: Aging programmer

#228

Post by a_e_k »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #115
mathgeek wrote: post #8

We all benefit from a world where productive developers are applauded for choosing between parallel tracks as ICs and managers.

Productive developers don't necessarily make good managers. Been doing this stuff for a long time and never came across the acronym IC, what is it?

"Individual contributor", i.e., not a manager; a leaf on the org-tree.

Re: Aging programmer

#229

Post by granshaw »

hindsightbias wrote: post #215
ransom1538 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Programmers are in a bubble. Head over to the local grocery store. The person bagging your groceries is 63. There is no retirement plan for him - as well as most Americans. These "old" people will end up working until 70, on their feet . If I can find someone to pay me to…

I had an office mate whose dream was to retire to the tools desk at HD. While brutal, there is something to working later from a health perspectice. When I was young, retirees played tennis and golf but I dont see as much of that in my cohort.

Snide all you want about it, but the country club trend provided community and physical activity

Re: Aging programmer

#230

Post by Instantix »

scarface74 wrote: post #179
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is the batteries included approach taken nowadays. Many developers nowadays seem to expect to be able to just wire things together without actual writing much algorithmic code. And the solutions have catered to that. Those of us that are older lament the idea of using frameworks to increase our productivity, but still being more than glorified middle-men.

Why reinvent the wheel? I’ve seen “architects” who didn’t think they needed Entity Framework and went about solving the same problems (mostly around change tracking) very badly. Give me a widely supported framework any day over a badly written unsupported in house solution.

Sometime frameworks are a real help, sometime using it is just making thing bloated and it's hard-linking the future to someone who have the knowledge of the framework.
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