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Sucks to be an old engineer

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Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#191

Post by rbanffy »

MetaCosm wrote: post #147
jarek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must have missed the part where MetaCosm stated his developer was buying health insurance in an age-discriminating market.

He was in the US (Arizona if I remember correctly), and had been incorporated for a number of years... but I have no idea about his health care situation... the joy of contractors, I don't have to care. I give him $180 an hour for X hours, he gives me a wonderful product, everyone goes home happy.

> the joy of contractors, I don't have to care.

Not really. If the contractor gets sick, it's still your problem.

I care for my contractors and always make sure they are paid enough to afford good medical care and a stable financial situation. It makes sense, even from a deeply selfish point of view - the less time they spend worrying about such things, the more they spend working.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#192

Post by tibbon »

vacri wrote: post #151
tibbon wrote: post #99

Maybe its because I'm not old (30), but the sentiment of this post strikes me as bullshit. At any age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then that's a different problem. New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough…

I'm 40, but I'm not about to tell a 55-year-old what it's like to try and find employment as a 55-year-old. Just saying 'keep yourself current' is missing a lot of the picture.

I guess I'm looking at it from a hiring perspective. I don't care how old someone is honestly. I just care what they can do and what they contribute to the team. Having a bit of grey hair is probably an asset, since hopefully they've been to this rodeo once or twice and have some good experiences that we don't.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#193

Post by mattdeboard »

michaelochurch wrote: post #142
greenyoda wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unless you're the CEO, being a manager is both managing and being managed at the same time.

Right. The corporate system seems to be designed to make almost everyone miserable so the people at the bottom want the jobs above them. The problem is that it leads to pernicious and destructive internal competition, not excellence. My philosophy: mentoring, coordination, and very occasional police work (against internal harassment and bad behavior) are the only valuable contributions of management. The rest of it i…

You spend a lot of time -- "a lot" is a pretty big understatement based on your online activity, blog etc. -- thinking and writing about how miserable being employed at companies X and Y made you. I'm really curious why. I've been miserable in a series of jobs before and the last thing I want to do is go back and wallow in it.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#194

Post by michaelochurch »

mattdeboard wrote: post #193
michaelochurch wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The corporate system seems to be designed to make almost everyone miserable so the people at the bottom want the jobs above them. The problem is that it leads to pernicious and destructive internal competition, not excellence. My philosophy: mentoring, coordination, and very occasional police work (against internal harassment and bad behavior) are the only valuable contributions of management. The rest of it i…

You spend a lot of time -- "a lot" is a pretty big understatement based on your online activity, blog etc. -- thinking and writing about how miserable being employed at companies X and Y made you. I'm really curious why. I've been miserable in a series of jobs before and the last thing I want to do is go back and wallow in it.

The problem with the career/work game is that when you get robbed (a) it's considered to be your fault, and (b) you never get back the time lost.

If there were a way to pop back into the state one should be at, at one's age, were it not for the robberies, then forgiveness would be possible. You'd just recover and forget. But this is a game where if you get screwed, your competition is out there getting better experience so you keep getting screwed in the future, and soon enough you're 40 years old and still a nobody. Fuck that.

Also, these problems that I'm attacking are huge problems. If I could, for one example, start a process that made it socially unacceptable for a company to run closed allocation and call itself a technology company, that'd easily add $10+ trillion in value to the world economy. That's just a massive effect. Obviously, one person can't cause that kind of change, but there's no reason not to try to start the process.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#195

Post by ycombobreaker »

timr wrote: post #173
ycombobreaker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Medical appointments are pretty much the same as when I was a kid. I have a young child, and I have had enough conversations with doctors and nurses to see that standards for medical care _do_ change rapidly enough to matter. Some examples: - At the hospital where my wife gave birth, the SOP is an epidural and continuous fetal monitoring. This means that very little equipment is available which supports mobility. T…

I never claimed that things don't change...just that the rate of change is pretty slow by comparison to software. Look at your examples: in the first, you're talking about the difference between laying down and...not laying down. And how long have people been giving birth in hospitals? In the second example, you're discussing a subtle difference in the age at which kids are fed a specific food. Medicine moves slowly…

> Look at your examples: in the first, you're talking about the difference between laying down and...not laying down. And how long have people been giving birth in hospitals?

In the U.S., we've been giving birth in a hospital under the supervision of a doctor for several generations now. When my grandparents were of childbearing age, there were some pretty horrific practices. Now they are recognized as such, but the turning point occurred during someone's lifetime. Likewise, it doesn't sound like a big deal, but the culture of "laying down" has a significant impact on how we as a culture have babies:

- The mother's position is not naturally conducive to popping a baby out. This adds difficulty to pushing.

- The mother's position puts all of the baby's weight onto her back, rather than on her legs. This causes more pain, which can lead to further medicinal intervention (e.g. epidurals or IIRC narcotics).

- Motion (walking, lunges, etc.) is helpful to get a fetus into the right position (head down, facing mother's back) and to advance its station. This benefit is lost while lying down.

- Gravity is not of assistance while lying down. It helps while squatting.

Etc. What sounds like such a little thing can end up making a world of difference. And today's ossified doctor who insists that the mother lay on her back is very similar to today's ossified developer who insists on using the Win32 C API for trivial data-entry UIs. Regardless of the rate of change of the field as a whole, ossification and inflexibility is problematic with whatever is changing right now.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#196

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #149
vowelless wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also fairly regularly get calls from recruiters. Not everyone has a wikipedia article :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright

That brings up a relevant issue. I realized a long time ago that developing an professional online persona is worthwhile. To that end, I recommend regularly to people: 1. create a website from your own name, like walterbright.com, and put your professional work there 2. create a github account under your own name, and contribute to significant projects using it 3. ditto for stackoverflow, hackernews, gamedev.net and…

Sadly, I often run across technical articles where the author omitted his own name, not even a pseudonym. I don't understand this.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#197

Post by nikatwork »

rbanffy wrote: post #182
nikatwork wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in finance. We are teaching plenty of fresh-faced graduate recruit devs COBOL.

For someone into retrocomputing (who even made a 327x-ish terminal font), being paid to learn COBOL is weirdly interesting.

Most of the org's original COBOL programmers are retirement age. So there's 60yo greybeards teaching COBOL to 20yos.

It's a weird time to be a mainframer. If you are an experienced specialist you can charge insane hourly rates. At the same time, some bigger orgs have started transitioning off the old stack because all the experts keep dying or retiring.

At some point mainframe specialist skills will go from insanely valuable to completely worthless.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#198

Post by timr »

ycombobreaker wrote: post #195
timr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never claimed that things don't change...just that the rate of change is pretty slow by comparison to software. Look at your examples: in the first, you're talking about the difference between laying down and...not laying down. And how long have people been giving birth in hospitals? In the second example, you're discussing a subtle difference in the age at which kids are fed a specific food. Medicine moves slowly…

> Look at your examples: in the first, you're talking about the difference between laying down and...not laying down. And how long have people been giving birth in hospitals? In the U.S., we've been giving birth in a hospital under the supervision of a doctor for several generations now. When my grandparents were of childbearing age, there were some pretty horrific practices. Now they are recognized as such, but the…

Your grandparents were of childbearing age a generation ago. When they were pushing out babies, computers didn't exist.

Perspective, please.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#199

Post by nahname »

MaggieL wrote: post #4

It doesn't suck to be an old engineer. It sucks to be an engineer with outdated skills. I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012. I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.

How do you stay with it? I'm approaching 30 and worry about burning out. Many people I talk to seem to agree the shelf life for exceptional engineers is about 7 years.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#200

Post by ams6110 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #109
cletus wrote: post #62

This post is touching on two issues that are somewhat related but different: 1. Finding ANY job when you're 60 is hard; 2. Engineers (who are still engineers) at 40+ will often be passed over in favour of twentysomethings. Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in…

"Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have." Why would you think so? I left home at age 18. My parents were 37 and 40 years old at the time. At that time and for many years after that, I had tons of non-work priorities, certainly more than my parents. And I don't think that's an exception. Most people never really make work their priority. Don't mistake that for an age related phenomeno…

Your last sentence is spot on. There is not that much challenge in picking up Python or Ruby if you are an accomplished C or Perl programmer.
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