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Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

prog21.dadgum.com

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Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#31

Post by lifebeyondfife »

I know and have worked with coders in their 50s, even 60s. They were very much what I'd call 9-to-5 coders though. They were never given big, important or new projects but as a consequence were never expected to burn the midnight oil.

The main thing that looks unappealing to me about being a hacker decades from now is the constant cycle of learning. I'm on probably my 3rd generation upheaval. I've worked on a daily basis in a team of programmers with C, C++, C#, Java and Python. Getting familiar enough with those languages to do more than just tinker took a lot of effort - even for the languages that are pretty similar e.g. C# and Java. I'm now looking to do more front to back website coding (away from pure desktop/server stuff) so I'm trying a few things out before choosing on the main stack of technologies I need to master.

In my early thirties I still have the enthusiasm to do this but I find it hard to picture doing the same ten years from now with the same smile on my face.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#32

Post by dschiptsov »

That's solved long ago.

There are some underlying concepts, foundation ideas which didn't change much since 1960-70-80s, the time when they have been discovered, studied and defined.

Yes, people are piling up tons of crap in order to get money, and this is how we got a millions lines of meaningless Java code which no one could understand or maintain, which seems to work well only because most of unit-tests passed and hardware is so cheap.

I don't even want to mention current Javascript madness.

At the same time, however, almost nothing were added to the ideas expressed by John McCarthy, and followers.

Yes. They are stuffing tons of useless crap into new Scheme standard, as they did with Common Lisp, but, the underlying ideas and the principles of "less is more" and "good enough" remain unshaken, like mountains in Nepal.)

In a very rare occasions we still can witness some miracles. For example, the source code of this site - the engine and the language translator in which it written is less than one megabyte. (just imagine what amount of traffic it handles and how much money already created).

There are also Plan9, nginx and few other wonders.

So, in ones 50s one, perhaps, should enjoy knowing and applying these principles and ideas and produce ones own small wonders. Or teach others, as enlightened people like Gerald Jay Sussman or Brian Harvey do.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#34

Post by bravoyankee »

It's about skimming great oceans of APIs that you could spend years studying and learning, but the market will have moved on by then and that's no fun anyway, so you cut and paste from examples and manage to get by without a full picture of the architecture supporting your app.

Well stated. Man, do I feel like that. But I think this is a universal problem now. Information is freely available, and there's so much of it. An endless buffet, and it doesn't matter what field you get in to.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#35

Post by lifebeyondfife »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #9

The frustrations of this are less than frustrations of almost every other job I know. I hope to mitigate the frustrations by simplicity - the idea of a few great tools I know inside and out

The point is you have to be prepared to re-select the 'few great tools' you know every decade or so and invest time getting to know them inside out. That can get very tiring as you get older.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#36

Post by jacquesm »

Hell yes!

There are many different kinds of programming, some are fun and some are not.

If you really want to be doing this when you're 50 make sure you get good enough that you can pick the projects that are fun. If by the time you are 50 and you've been doing this for 3 decades you are still gluing api's that's not the fault of 'programming', that's a direct result of choices made earlier.

And one more thing: on the scale of things that you could be doing, look at your parents, grandparents and their grandparents and what they were doing when they were 50. Suddenly that api gluing doesn't look so bad at all.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#37

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

gonzo wrote: post #20

I am 50. I had a large portion of the 'middle' of my career in management, including a couple CTO/VP Eng positions, with the traditional increasing stress. So I moved to Hawaii for nearly a decade, got rid of the stress, rediscovered programming, and I'm happy again.

Cool, so are you in Hawaii right now? If so, which island? If you're on Oahu I might've already met you.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#38

Post by danso »

I want to be programming, but in the line of non-professional software development, whether it's making open-source tools or to advance the processes of a cause/organization/business that I support, on my own terms. I've been lucky that I haven't had to go into a purely software dev job at a company...

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#39

Post by danso »

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #35
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #9

The frustrations of this are less than frustrations of almost every other job I know. I hope to mitigate the frustrations by simplicity - the idea of a few great tools I know inside and out

The point is you have to be prepared to re-select the 'few great tools' you know every decade or so and invest time getting to know them inside out. That can get very tiring as you get older.

How is that different from any other job? Listen even to people in traditionally creative/uplifting jobs...including artists and teachers. It's depressing to hear how much of their time is struggling with data entry/Excel/why-wont-the-font-stay-the-same-size issues...time (and energy and angst) that is probably substantial over their career

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#40

Post by muyuu »

praptak wrote: post #8

Late 30s represent, yo. The author of the article mentions high stress. My experience differs. In my case the stress sort of waned by itself. I think I moved a bit towards Wally character from the Dilbert series. I don't overcommit anymore and I certainly gained resistance to "aggressive schedules" and visions of doom and gloom tied to deadline skips. So I stress out less and less and I believe it comes naturally wit…

I think the crux of the matter is your job security and your financial stability (the economy where you live, etc). If you can afford to delay projects as needed without risking your position then of course that takes a lot of pressure off you and things are more enjoyable.

In an ideal world, I'd be set financially by the time I'm 50 and I would work in my own stuff exclusively or almost exclusively.

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