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Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

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Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#21

Post by tgflynn »

Radzell wrote: post #6
tgflynn wrote: post #2

Maybe this is why so much software these days looks like it was written by unsupervised youngsters. I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version. The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science,…

It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young prog…

Try reading what I actually wrote instead of what your preconceptions and prejudices are telling you.

It took my a day to find out that ListView's do not work.

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#22

Post by dneb7 »

Radzell wrote: post #7
cageface wrote: post #4

Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40. If this is really true then where do they all go? There's only so many seats for managers and architects.

How many 40 year old software programmers could there be the area of science has only been around 40 years.

How long ago was 1992? Anyone that was working as a developer as recently as 1992 is now almost guaranteed to be 40+.

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#23

Post by rasur »

Radzell wrote: post #6
tgflynn wrote: post #2

Maybe this is why so much software these days looks like it was written by unsupervised youngsters. I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version. The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science,…

It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young prog…

So, you're not an English major then?

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#24

Post by nirvana »

There's a persistent myth that needs to be put down:

It doesn't get at all harder to learn new technologies when you get older. In fact, it gets a whole lot easier.

There's an old saying "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", and this is true, to the extent that any cliche can be, when referring to people becoming set in their ways. For many professions, where the technology doesn't' change, this is true. For programmers "set in your ways" simply describes the method by which we pick up new technology since that's what the profession is all about. (I prefer books to youtube videos, for instance.)

Learning new languages and new technologies and new platforms is a whole lot easier now than it was 20 years ago, in part because the technology for delivering information is a lot more available (hell the internet alone is a huge impact) but also because, having learned a dozen languages the next language is a lot easier to pick up.

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#26

Post by Hoff »

Radzell wrote: post #6
tgflynn wrote: post #2

Maybe this is why so much software these days looks like it was written by unsupervised youngsters. I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version. The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science,…

It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young prog…

The parent was commenting on a broken framework, something that should be an anathema in any shipping product, and around spending (wasting) time determining that the API itself was faulty. Replacing the faulty API call took two hours.

But to follow onto to your point, it's also the case that the younger programmers can need a decade or more to make enough mistakes; to variously learn what the older programmers already know about various fundamentals of the programming and product-creation business.

And to extend your point, it's been my experience that having a team of younger programmers is just as big a headache and as big a mistake as having a team comprised entirely of older programmers. A mix works better, as the younger folks teach the older folks and they bring knowledge of new technologies and volumes of enthusiasm, and the older folks can teach the younger programmers about temperance, testing, productization and business in general.

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#27

Post by cowholio4 »

jroseattle wrote: post #18

Wow, what hogwash. I still don't see where the article connects the dots -- why, exactly, would I end up working for an English major? As for the balance of the article, most of the finger-pointing to dead-end oblivion for 40+ programmers is that they're priced out of the market. While that may be true in some cases, it's certainly not a trend I'm seeing -- rather, the opposite. Mostly, this article was written by so…

Eh... I wouldn't write off the author that easily. I had him as a professor at UC Davis.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/matloff.html

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#28

Post by cjoh »

This is more about risk than it is intelligence. It's the case that as most people get older, their tolerance for risk gets less and less: they pick up things like "spouses," "mortgages" and "children" which make it so that they cannot afford to work for equity/cash combinations.

I suspect this is also why you see a trend of "I don't want to work 80 hour weeks" posts bubbling up these days as well (though that could be confirmation bias) -- the initial Web2.0 generation is getting to be that age.

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#29

Post by Retric »

jwoah12 wrote: post #19
sausagefeet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think newer programmer's just work for less. There really isn't that much new under the sun in software engineering.

Really? And here I was thinking that my discipline was one of the most rapidly evolving on the planet...

Not so much, mostly people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Consider, there is vary little that separates handheld Apps from desktop applications. Sure, if you come from the Web side of things it seems new and nifty but they are just stand alone applications. Capacitive sensing touch screens where where new in 1965, but wait it's 2012. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

People worry about what happens when desktop CPU's have hundreds of cores, but the super computer world is already dealing with hundreds of thousands of cores etc.

PS: I think this relates to the hacker mentality. If you find a problem you look for a solution rater than see how other people solved the same problem 30 years ago.

Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

#30

Post by tybris »

Sure, many software engineers are over their creative prime by the time they hit 40 and move into management, training, recruiting, etc. With 15-20 years experience in the complexities of software engineering under the belt, they are probably pretty good at it. What does that have to do with English majors?
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