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Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
91–100 of 260 posts
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#92Late 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.
In my experience it's not so much about missing deadlines with impunity, as negotiating up front what you're willing to commit to delivering. A lot of times you can put off some "nice to have" features without anyone complaining, as long as the core functionality is ready on time. (That may be what you meant by "delaying.")
The other part is renegotiating timelines when they make changes to stuff you've already built.
Financial security helps but the real key is being skilled enough to accomplish a lot without breaking a sweat. As much as possible, build reusable components with nice APIs, even if it means putting in some extra time up front. Always think about how to make your own job easier down the road, and after a while you'll have an easy job.
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#93I enjoy programming and would like to be doing it at 50, but with regard to the software industry itself... not in its current state. If you want to be able to survive more than 10 years in the software industry, you need to get manager-level clout and full autonomy over your work. That's non-negotiable. This industry destroys you if you don't have those things. The terrifying thing about the software industry is tha…
There is another option: find a really good manager who is able and willing to give you what you need, make sure they understand your value, and stay with them. I don't really know how to do that, I just got lucky. I moved into management myself about five years ago (still working for the same guy), and I'm trying to be the same kind of manager for the people who work for me.
I like that idea as well, but the problem is that your manager will, over the long term, change. Most people have no insurance against some person they've never met being hired above them. You need enough independent credibility to protect yourself against that. You have 5 years of managerial experience, so you probably have enough work experience that any job move would be a likely promotion, so your company has incentives not to treat you badly.
I used to think the software industry was about programming: writing great code to solve hard problems. It's not. It's about credibility and technical risk. The software industry is 90% industry and only 10% software. Most of your time will be spent convincing people to allow you to do useful stuff, not actually doing useful stuff.
The ironic thing is that, as software jobs increasingly slide toward looking more like widget-making and less like research, programmers become a lot less effective. Valve established that open allocation works. (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie...) Every other software shop has proven that the alternative (still more popular) doesn't.
The Death of R&D, I think, will be looked upon as the "conscious" decision (of course, large groups such as nations do nothing "consciously"; it's a historian's metaphor) of the United States to go from a world leader to third-rate in a few decades.
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#94I 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 b…
Oh, interesting. I love the learning cycle. If I wasn't constantly learning new tools and tech then I would get really frustrated with my job.
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I remember an industry teacher once saying to me that "You'll probably never put '10 years experience in Technology X' on a CV." because by the time it's been around for that long it will be pretty much obsolete. The fundamentals of computer science won't change (big-O, synchronised distributed systems, logic etc.) so I suppose it will just come down to re-learning the modern day tech. But that's the sam…
I think the skillset as we get older is knowing when to duck. It might be called wisdom, mentoring, what have you but basically, having been in situation X before, you can give sensible advice to someone just entering situation X. Monetising that is generally harder
Reading through all the comments has reinforced my original comment that this kind of "bring it on" passion is heavily correlated to geo-location, culture, industry and day-to-day grind that one is put through.
>> Monetising that is generally harder
Tell me all about it! So, I've heard of elephant graveyards and jet graveyards... Now, where do all those grizzled, veteran (old) programmers go away (other than into management)?
:)
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#96I love programming too, but I agree, high stress programming for other people is what you do early in your career not late.
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#97I 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 b…
Oh, interesting. I love the learning cycle. If I wasn't constantly learning new tools and tech then I would get really frustrated with my job.
I'm happy for you. But sooner or later it gets to you. No one can say when/how/why, but it does. Happens to the best, happens to everyone else a little sooner. Until then, enjoy the ride. :-)
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#9857, programming for 33 years with hardly a day off, and having more fun than ever. My motivation? It's not about the technology, the tools, the apps, the business, the customers, or even the money, although any of those can provide plenty of motivation. And believe it or not, it's not even about the happy dance feeling I get when something I built works for the first time. It's about the achievements of those who use…
So it is about achievements of your paying customers using your technology business's apps you wrote using tools at your hand. Simply put you are happy that you have created something useful to others or there is something more?
My father worked with his hands for his entire working life; at the time, he tells me, he worked on the U.S. Coast Guard Eagle more than anyone else (such as replacing the entire decking, etc). It's something that he's extremely proud of and something he can actually show his grandchildren.
On the other hand, I build things that are, for the most part, abstract and virtual. I enjoy what I do because it allows me to be creative using technologies and tools that I enjoy working with. (And I really enjoy building entire applications from scratch, so much so that I will be creating businesses to really scratch my itches.)
I'm proud that an application that I built half a decade ago is still being used. But, for the most part, most of my work has a limited life-span. Is that so bad?
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#99That'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…
Would you mind sharing the the "few other wonders"?
I've been able to pull many programming lessons from the other activity I enjoy, woodworking. When I first started, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of items in catalogs and stores. I didn't know where to begin!
And then I discovered Japanese woodworking, and traditional woodworking, and people like James Krenov and Roy Underhill.
It is impressive what people have built with a small set of simple, sharp tools.
I love seeing these gems, regardless of the domain!
Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
#100I'm 51, and having a blast.
I'm still learning. I'm an ACM member and read at least a paper a week from one of the journals. I keep trying to improve my skills. (A couple months ago I realized I hadn't done much work with trees in a few years, so I spent a week going through tree balancing algorithms from several books. It was fun).
Hardest thing: Having to learn new stuff that isn't designed right. I'm going through a fair amount of that now. Having to move in with a large, not very well designed system and make serious additions to it is . . . irritating.