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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#71

Post by neom »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

Wow, Alex Garden on Hackernews. Hello fellow canuck. I'm now getting up there, still a few years shy of y'all but not much. I came up through the 90s and early 2000s, all web/linux stuff, irc servers, bash scripts, python, weird php hacks, whatever, I was a kid. I'd lose track of time, It was Monday night after high school then all of a sudden it was Sunday morning and I was talking on irc about the crazy LAMP stack I'd put together. 2am? pfft, what is sleep?! Sadly with very strong dyslexia and dyscalculia, being a real programmer was never in the cards for me, I understood how everything worked, I can explain the whole thing end to end in great depth, but ask me predictably how to do a table in html or some fairly simple CSS, and I'll be there for hours. I'm grateful the rest of my life allowed me to be programmer adjacent and spend so much time around developers, but always a little frustrated I couldn't pick up the hammer myself.

These days, I've never been more excited about building. The frustration of being slow with the code is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#72

Post by AIorNot »

I’m 50 too and I’ve complained and yearned about the “old” days too, a lot of this is nostalgia as we reminisce about periods of time in our youth when we had the exuberance and time to play and build with technology of our own time

Working in AI startups strangely enough I see a lot of the same spirit of play and creativity applied to LLM based tools - I mean what is OpenClaw but a fun experiment

Those kids these days are going to reminisce about the early days of AI when prompts would be handwritten and LLMs would hallucinate

I’m not really sure 1983, 1993 or 2003 really was that gold of age but we look at it with rose colored glasses

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#74

Post by zero_shift »

I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The question is, what other careers are out there for someone who wants to make things?

About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills.

Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An industry in decline.

It is a shame, what is happening. But I still think, even with AI hollowing out the fun parts, tech remains the best job for a smart, motivated person who's willing to learn new things.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#75

Post by rdiddly »

serf wrote: post #24

6 or 7 , 38 now -- and having a blast. it isn't all funeral marches and group crying sessions. And don't let the blog post fool you , it is a rant about AI -- otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200 paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years. Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity w…

Thanks for reminding me of the word plinth. I agree with the author that the job is less fun now, less interesting. I'm doing and accomplishing more, and it matters less. And unfortunately, having other ways of defining your identity doesn't really help, for me. What it does is make those other aspects of myself relatively more attractive as careers, in comparison to this one. Although then again, I suppose it's helping in the way you intend: I could leave (and I might), I could adapt. So I'm feeling none of the fear or anxiety about AI. Just something that I think is roughly boredom.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#76

Post by pixl97 »

cenamus wrote: post #31
pixl97 wrote: post #25

A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands. Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne. We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product. And so the change of technology goes.

And the blacksmiths losing their jobs are not allowed to feel bad about it?

You either become a foreman operating the machines or a Luddite burning them.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#78

Post by netsharc »

nightski wrote: post #41
chasd00 wrote: post #27

What the author describes is also the feeling when you shift from being a developer all day to being a team lead or manager. When you become a lead you have to let go and get comfortable with the idea that the code is not going to be how you would do it. You can look at code produced by your team and attempt to replace it all with your craftsmanship but you're just setting yourself up to fail. The right approach is u…

It's fun managing a bunch of inexperienced juniors when there are no consequences (aka the infamous personal projects). It's a lot more stressful when it matters.

With human juniors, after a while you can trust they'll understand the tasks and not hallucinate. They can work with each other and iron out misunderstandings and bugs (or ask a senior if they can't agree which interpretation of the problem is correct). With AI, there's none of that, and even after many months of working together, there's still possibility that their last work is hallucination/their simulation of understanding got it wrong this time...

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#79

Post by alexgarden »

neom wrote: post #71
alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

Wow, Alex Garden on Hackernews. Hello fellow canuck. I'm now getting up there, still a few years shy of y'all but not much. I came up through the 90s and early 2000s, all web/linux stuff, irc servers, bash scripts, python, weird php hacks, whatever, I was a kid. I'd lose track of time, It was Monday night after high school then all of a sudden it was Sunday morning and I was talking on irc about the crazy LAMP stack…

Go Canada! I personally can't wait to see what happens to the world when all of us find the passion to create again.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#80

Post by abraxas »

gustavopezzi wrote: post #29

Thank you for writing this. My feelings are very similar to the ones described by the author and the timeline almost matches. The thrill of tecnology for me started to fast decay since the early 2010s and now I see it as a no-return stage. I still have fun with my retro hardware & software but I am no longer an active practitioner and I have pivoted my attention and my efforts somewhere else. Unfortunately, I no long…

What do you do for living now (if anything)?
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