Live data from Hacker News

Does life end after 35?

kzhu.net

101–110 of 228 posts

Re: Does life end after 35?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys have trouble getting dates with attractive girls?

Don't worry, you'll eventually grow out of this attitude. Your confidence will increase. You won't have to say stuff like this in an effort to feel better about yourself. Hang in there and good luck.

No I'm serious. Ha. Hows the dating scene in the 40s? I'm going to be there soon. The 30's came on insanely fast.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#102
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting 40 made me just feel old. I no longer have as much energy, keeping my weight got harder and let's not forget the annoying loss of hair. Additional experience is somewhat nice, but doesn't make up for it. Then again I spend most of my 30's getting out of debt because of a failed startup. Which might have given me a more negative view on life (last time I could afford traveling around was ~10 years ago).

Shave your head. That's one problem solved.

You can tell the difference between a bald guy with a shaved head vs. a guy with a full head of hair with a shaved head. I'd bet the social advantages of hair still belong to the full-head-of-hair-shaved guy.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#103
The immigration process delayed the start of my startup and I'm sure many others are facing that too. Started at 28 even though I'd been in the US since I was 19.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#104
post #34

Great reminder. I am turning 32 early next year and started teaching myself programming this year. Sometimes doubt creeps up on me and makes me feel like I am wasting my time, but stuff like this helps. Onward!

Well done, keep it up! I am 30 in a few months and already a developer so it is great to see someone marginally older than me just taking it up. Out of interest, what did you do before?

Re: Does life end after 35?

#105
I wish I could take this amazing advice for granted. I'm in my late thirties (36) and still can't afford having a baby. As you may guess, one cannot wait till his sixties for that...

So, it really depends on what's the meaning of "successful" to you :)

Re: Does life end after 35?

#106

35 seems like a nice round number for people to self-sort into two bins: people that decided yes, it's time to stop trying, there will be no more sunrises... and then the other set, who think this is just ridiculous and roll their eyes that age has anything to do with it. And even if the second set is wrong, and there is actually something about getting older that actually slows us down or makes us worth less, it's a…

Here's how I look at it. It's not the decimal number of years since your birth, but the phase in your life that closes doors. In tech, you constantly need to keep up to date on the latest technologies, read publications and go to conferences, because experience gets stale very fast. It's also easier (than in fields like medicine or law) for junior techies to get up to speed in experience, because they can skip the de…

the "latest technologies" thing is questionable. A COBOL programmer can still charge the highest hourly rate of anyone in the industry, because surviving COBOL programs must be very valuable (or else they would have been replaced.)

In the world where App Academy and the like are churning out iPhone developers, Ruby on Rails programmers, and Javascript (uh, what's the word for person who works in JS?.... ) advocates in eight to twelve weeks doesn't make those sound like skills to hone to get your long-term stability.

Personally, I keep being surprised by how much value there is in just remembering how tech worked in the 1990s and even the early 2000s - Windows and OSX and Linux have changed a lot and iOS and Android seem completely new - but a lot of platform decisions evolved gradually in the changing technical context, and throwback behaviors can seem completely mysterious to someone who's first programming environment was XCode - there's still DOS behaviors hidden in some of these places! I wouldn't be surprised if ye olde mainframe experts had some even subtler knowledge about how-things-really-work-under-there than I do.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#107
post #20

I often worry about whether my startup clock is running out. I'm closer to 30 than 20, finishing up graduate school, and for the most part feel young. But other than the pediatrics ward, the only other time I start to feel my age is when attending some of these startup events. What I try to keep conscious of is knowing what's reported in the media and what isn't, which are often 2 completely different worlds. On Tech…

Its interesting to note that I recently read the average entrepreneur is age 35. It may just be selection bias by the press that makes it seem younger.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#109
post #11

I turned 40 last year, and I am loving it. I miss the physical resilience of being in my 20s, but I wouldn't trade where I am now to go back to my 20s. I grew up relatively sheltered in New England, and moved to NYC to teach as soon as I graduated from college. I spent my 20s teaching in the city and bicycling around North America in the summers. At 29, I moved to Alaska. I spent my 30's climbing mountains, doing mou…

Getting 40 made me just feel old. I no longer have as much energy, keeping my weight got harder and let's not forget the annoying loss of hair. Additional experience is somewhat nice, but doesn't make up for it. Then again I spend most of my 30's getting out of debt because of a failed startup. Which might have given me a more negative view on life (last time I could afford traveling around was ~10 years ago).

Just some unwarranted advice, the energy thing can be changed with proper diet and exercise, I'm 35 and it's amazing what a difference eating paleo and exercising 3+ times a week has made.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#110

I wish I could take this amazing advice for granted. I'm in my late thirties (36) and still can't afford having a baby. As you may guess, one cannot wait till his sixties for that... So, it really depends on what's the meaning of "successful" to you :)

I know it is trite to say, "No one can afford having a kid." but it's really the truth.

For me, sure daycare, toys, and food aren't putting me in the poorhouse, but there is no way I can bankroll everything I think my kids deserve.

Post reply on HN