351–360 of 375 posts
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How did you get thru the endemic leetcode stuff?
I studied my ass off! I did 300 LC questions and could finish LC mediums pretty easily and I found that most companies concentrated on easy and medium.
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I have avoided this problem by not interviewing anymore. Every job I have had after my first one has been going to work with someone I worked with before, and they recruited me so I didn’t have to do any formal interview process. It has worked for me so far in my 15 year career.
Dang those are amazing connections. Even with good connections I can only get my CV to the top of the pile and maybe some more leeway from the interviewers (which is a lot!), but never was I just skipped through the whole thing and gotten an offer. You have some good friends are they are high up the chain I guess.
I then joined the next company when the people who started that company started a new one.
When that startup failed, I was going to take a break and maybe start my own company, but a guy who had worked for me at the failed startup invited me over for margaritas and to check out his new company he had joined, and next thing I knew I had accepted a job offer.
I have been at the last job for almost 10 years.
I now have a ton of connections from people who I worked with and they then left the company. I am sure if I was interested in getting a new job, I could put some feelers out and have some offers right away. I have had people try to recruit me, but don't have much interest in leaving my current place.
I don't think my experience is that unusual. It is so hard to find good talent, sourcing from people you have worked with before is extremely valuable.
I've moved out of coding every day at work because I've gotten 'too senior' but my goal is to move jobs to get back into it and probably spend at least the next 5 years coding. What I do now is so high level that I can't see myself doing it for the next 25 years. That will bring me close enough to 40. I don't really see me stopping coding then.
I don't get why you'd be too senior to code if you like it. And I was very surprised to see the article author calling himself an aging programmer already at 40. I'm fast approaching that age and I feel I'm more productive than ever. At some point reading articles like this I was mildly worried about being employable as a programmer later in life. But not any longer. The amount of work seems to be ever increasing, an…
I don't get it either but at the company I am in.. everyone moves into positions where they code very little. It causes a lot of problems but that is how it is structured
Deteriorating eyesight, lower and upper back problems, hemorrhoids, weight gain, carpal tunnel syndrome and other RSIs are very, very common in our profession.
If you're reading this (perhaps because you still want to be programming in your 40s, 50s, and even 70s), make sure to prioritize your physical and mental health above everything else while you're still young. That is way more important than learning how not to suck at interviews, recognizing algorithms and knowing data structures. More important than compilers, programming languages, tools, hardware and operating systems.
It doesn't help if you used to be an exceptional architect, but you can't physically sit and code for even two straight hours anymore.
There isn't a massive amount of old programmers, for the same reason why you don't ever see a 70-year-old roughneck. Yes, the work of a programmer may not be as physically demanding, yet it requires certain mental and physical shape nevertheless.
So, please, keep yourself in shape. And not only by studying and acquiring new skills. Stay healthy for as long as you can stretch it out. Because sooner or later, that all sitting, staring at screens and coding will make you sick. That's just guaranteed.
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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. underst…
I could see this being ok if the certs were retaken regularly. Passing a cert at one point in time doesn't mean you've retained all the knowledge that cert is suppose to assess after some time has passed. This is essentially what TripleByte does for its process to find good engineers for startups.
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…
> The most appealing thing I'd seen recently was a company that wrote software to help maximize farm yields. At least there was some real, effective benefit for a great many people. After my graduate work I am the opppsite. I realized that meaningfulness is not a sufficient condotion for enjoying my work. The tasks I work on and my coworkers make a much larger impact on my happiness. Whether I work on something "stup…
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> 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 se…
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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.
He was beyond help. That was far from being the only issue.
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…
Same. In my case, I paid my way through law school doing software development contract work, which paid better than entry level lawyer work. Now I do a mix of software consulting/contracting and IP technical expert work (patent/copyright infringement analysis, claim charts, etc). I enjoy doing both kinds of work, though I really enjoy legal writing and I'd like to get more into IP litigation, writing pleadings, motions, oppositions, etc.
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Tbh I don’t understand how that gap could be closed. It’s not like this is the first generation or career or field with managers and ICs; has it ever closed?
It's politics - if we take a simple view of humanity over past 10,000 years we have seen a drift from "one strong man owns it all do as he says" to more distributed decision making - different resource allocation from different people - different concepts (trade, communication, cities, writing, money) have made it simpler / easier for more people to be invoked in the efficient allocation of resources I think software…
I would guess it’ll never be code. If code can handle advanced resource management, then at that point it’s probably AI and there will still be managers just dictating the parameters of how to manage.