I’m just a little farther down the road then him and this list hit so close to home. Really the only major deviation for me is my intense love for pair programming. Over the years I have come to accept that there are people who just can’t thrive in that paradigm, for numerous reasons, but also many who can and when I pair up with one that can there is no question that we are producing well in excess of 200%. Further, it’s just a nicer way to spend 8 hours coding with natural guilt free breaks to go down rabbit holes together.
Aging programmer
291–300 of 375 posts
Re: Aging programmer
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Hiring managers don't consider themselves ageist, but > Hiring managers don't want to be ageist, but I classify this into the "I'm not a racist, but..." bucket. > Hiring managers (usually fixated on 'new tech') who fear diminished learning, adoption or performance capacity in older employees This is the textbook definition of what ageism is. Conclusion? They are ageists, plain as that. They may not consider themsel…
I won't address "performance capacity" directly since it's too broad and vague, but it is plausible that there is diminished learning as we age. Think about learning new spoken languages. There's evidence to back the idea up in that context [0]. At the same time a 40 year old will likely have a higher proficiency at their language(s) than a 20 year old. This analogy exaggerates the idea (the trade-off) but I don't see why it wouldn't apply to programming languages as well. And this isn't ageism.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-what-age-does-....
Re: Aging programmer
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > People who can manage and code (architect, etc.) are truly rare. > I disagree with this. I think there are a lot of people who don't like being a leader for lots of reasons... Note that you are talking about different things from OP. OP was talking about managing, you are talking about leading. These are two very distinct skills. Sometimes you can find both in the same person, but these people are few and far bet…
> OP was talking about managing, you are talking about leading. These are two very distinct skills. Everything I've experienced in my professional life has taught me this: managers who can't lead can't manage, and leaders who can't manage cannot lead. Never once have I worked for a manager who didn't see themselves as a leader, and never once have I met someone who called themselves a leader who wasn't management.
Leading and managing are two separate skills there are plenty of tech leads who neither have to nor want to deal with managing people, 1x1’s, worrying about others career development, etc.
A leader can lead initiatives just via building relationship and having expertise without role power or any reports.
Re: Aging programmer
#294I'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 have 20 yoe but happy to be mentored by someone with much less. There is too much to learn out there, so good chance the less experienced engineer can help me too.
Re: Aging programmer
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The strongest signal back then was serious contribution to any open source projects (strangely today that almost seems to count against you) Would you mind sharing why contribution to open source might have a negative impact for an interview?
People in several enterprises have told me having a visible open source profile would represent a cultural fit issue.
They...wouldn't be wrong.
Re: Aging programmer
#296Earlier 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've interviewed people with computer science phd's from schools with good reputations that couldn't program worth a damn when it came to some simple algorithm and practical coding questions in person so, I don't have a lot of faith in certs/degrees for this.
Computer science PHD is to professional programming what a food science degree
is to being a head chef: the wrong credential to rely on, even though it sounds
related and is somewhat transferrable.
It a small company not specialized in education and examinations can set a test and deduce if I am good enough to code, then this can be standardized. And there could be many certs: 1. can code, 2. can code c++, 3. understands multithreading … and so on.
Re: Aging programmer
#297I couldn't agree more with this post. - Nope, I don't want spend my week doing 1:1 with a team. - 40 years old and I was never so sharp as developer as now. Focused. Precise. Fearless. - Being the most senior developer in my team, doesn't put me in any special position other than I deliver a lot of good code, I do a lot of devops tasks, i review a lot of PR and people hear me. - I can scale my work through my peers.…
I could earn probably double, maybe even triple my salary and then I read your comment and realized it's true. If my salary now were halved, it'd still be more than the average US income earner. I Googled "US population average salary" and they have a nice graph. As a side note, get ready for the pitch forks, it started going up as we approached the then potential Trump era in 2016.
Yup, I could earn the double too, if i wanted to go back to office, be manager, or simply moving to Switzerland.. but as it is, is fine. We can be idealist and say: I work here because I like it, because I like the stack, because i like the product, etc.
btw in Germany, people are already sharping their pitch forks too..
Re: Aging programmer
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
But does that mean they're bad programmers? I don't think so at all. As a young person, we grew up with the internet so we're conditioned to just know the "pointer" to the information and then have to google/search for it. Now I've learned all the algorithms and data structures at uni too and passed the exams but what remains are the names of them and roughly when they are needed. It may be unfortunate but that's wha…
Once at an hackaton a computer science phd student ended up in my team. He was unable to execute a .py file.
Why didn't you help your teammate?
A PhD doesn't mean that a person knows everything. It means they made progress in understanding in a narrow area. Might not have included Python.
Re: Aging programmer
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point may be that, yes still as capable etc., but also with a ton more life-cycle experience in real-world development. So for someone hiring that values that experience, maybe they ask a bit more about that, and do less whiteboard work to validate that you really did go to CS school. With a string resume, a hiring manager might think "They probably know what a binary tree is because it they didn't, they…
Actually, three jobs ago back in 2015, I had two interviews. The first hiring manager asked me to do a merge sort on the whiteboard. The second company’s new director told me what problems he was having and that they were on an acquisition spree and what their plans were. He asked me how I would go about helping them. Both interviews were about half a day, I got offers from both the company that asked me to do a merg…
I interview a lot of people and I ask all of them to write code (standard for our company). There's plenty of people that can talk about all sorts of stuff but can't code. Who do you hire to write software? Also do you want to work somewhere where software engineers can't write software? Do you want to work somewhere where the people doing the planning can't write software?
Re: Aging programmer
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ap…
I'm working with a junior dev now and the phrase that I keep repeating is "slow the fuck down". He's completely frantic with the copy and paste. I'm watch him google something, click the first link, paste the code into his project, and when it doesn't work he's on to the next link, paste, repeat. He doesn't even back out the changes he made the first time that didn't work.
I spent hours fixing his code and hand it back to him and it's broken again in a week.
I had to wash my hands of it. The only advice he's getting out of me now is to follow a single tutorial all the way through until he gets that one tutorial working and then compare the tutorial to his code. I'll answer specific questions, but I'm not going to try to mentor him until he's ready to receive the wisdom.