I am 55 and have been programming computers since 1975 when I was 15 years old. Do the math, I have been programming now for 40 years. Recently, I had a conversation with someone else about this topic and I told them that I have never been so excited about my career, the field of computer science, and most importantly the opportunities that exist today in the field of technology. The excitement surrounding too many t…
I would have hired Doug, but...
41–50 of 244 posts
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#42I'm 30 now (from time to time I feel that I've already lived enough and am mostly done), the idea of expecting at least 30 productive years ahead of me is intriguing.
> I'm 30 now (from time to time I feel that I've already lived enough and am mostly done) This is the most absurd sentence I've read in weeks. Wow, man. Talk to some people a bit older than you, maybe, and realize that you haven't done anything.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#43I'm 30 and a senior programmer. What should I be doing to ensure I have career options at 50? Is management inevitable with individual contribution primarily reserved for scrappy youngsters?
The people that are resourceful will always find a way. Sometimes this may mean on your own, sometimes with a group. But as long as you can keep learning and just 'do things', you will be light years ahead of those that don't know what to do and look to other people to tell them.
From Steve Jobs:
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use."
It's hard sometimes (a lot of the time??) to get over that bit where 'no one is smarter than you'. (I'm not as smart as a Google PhD, am I??..) Once you can and you chart your own course because you are resourceful and confident and someone who can do things, then you won't need to ask the question you asked. :)
Good Luck! (I'm still on this journey)
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#44I am 55 and have been programming computers since 1975 when I was 15 years old. Do the math, I have been programming now for 40 years. Recently, I had a conversation with someone else about this topic and I told them that I have never been so excited about my career, the field of computer science, and most importantly the opportunities that exist today in the field of technology. The excitement surrounding too many t…
well, it is good that you like the things you do. at your age, we youngsters tend to expect you to be in the management level, not at individual contributor level. from time to time, i would see our team hiring engineer with gray hair and requiring special mechanical keyboard, and we all thought "mm.. interesting."
Well youngster, you seem to be falling behind the latest trends. Maybe you're not as young as you think. Don't you know all the fashionable programmers/gamers are using mechanical keyboards?
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. How is this different from any other profession? Developers can be so myopic. The narcissism in our industry really drives me up the wall. The only other industry that is this way, that I've seen, is the entertainment industry. The denizens of which also seem to suffer from this idea that they are totally unique and none of the plebeian hordes can possibly relate to what they go through.
I don't think it's the developers being myopic. For the most part, it's management that views development as a young person's game and encourages people to move out of the technical track and into the management track. If companies viewed programming as a long term career, they would put the pay scales in place to treat it as such. It's only a "trap" in the respect that in many (not all) places your pay maxes out as…
Tu quoque: the "my boss doesn't understand" problem in companies basically comes from people working for people with lower IQ than them. It's not a skillset gap, it's a pattern-recognition gap.
In the military, the best soldiers become officers, and the best officers become generals—even though these are all different skill-sets—because it's more important to have a good general than to have a good soldier, and so if you could, theoretically, do both tasks well, then the military's comparative advantage in allocating your brainpower is to make you a general.
In tech, we see a "career track" of engineers that attempts to be a meritocracy, with the engineering leads and fellows being the guys who have been there the longest—but that's more like the NCO track of the military, valuing experience for the job they're doing, but not the raw brainpower and tenacity to do jobs well generally. Management, meanwhile, is not-at-all a meritocracy; managers hire from outside based on credentialism, and engineers are "pushed into" management based on credence from fellow devs (the same thing you get from being a battle-tested NCO), rather than being "pulled in" by an actual need.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see the same thing, but feel much more optimistic about it: it's not, in my mind, that tech is effectively fashion, but rather that there are "futurist" ideas that tech keeps trying and which keep not getting adoption , because it's not their time yet—the state of the art isn't there to make the experience for the average consumer (or the average developer) justify the costs. An example of what I mean: the Apple Ne…
Not to be that guy, but Apple Newton: 1993 Palm Pilot: 1997 Smartphones: ~2002 iPhone: 2007 Android: 2008 iPad: 2010
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#47I am 55 and have been programming computers since 1975 when I was 15 years old. Do the math, I have been programming now for 40 years. Recently, I had a conversation with someone else about this topic and I told them that I have never been so excited about my career, the field of computer science, and most importantly the opportunities that exist today in the field of technology. The excitement surrounding too many t…
I am 53 and started programming in 1977. I feel EXACTLY the same as you.
Edit: seriously, what is your env like? Are you into windows, osx, unix, linux?
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#48When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a CS degree, get good at it, and go earn a fantastic income right out of school. I heard the words. I understood the words. I agreed with the words. Even now, 30 years later, I keep asking "is this a trap that I choose to remain in?" I still love programming, but it i…
But where do you go? You haven't "seriously tried doing anything else" for the last 30 years. A trap is a trap because you cannon leave it.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#49"Unlike Engelbart, I have re-tooled. I now work in JavaScript in the browser and on the server. I had to walk away from the codebase that I loved. I understood that the price of relevance is to give up fighting at some point and settle for a partial victory. I think I was right in the development environment I created. But right doesn't mean the world uses what you created." Yep. That's the key to staying relevant: c…
For me, the thing that gets a bit discouraging at times is the feeling of riding a slow-motion merry-go-round. Every 10 years or so you see the same ideas start to come around again, only with some new paint and landscaping. I have found myself more than once thinking that learning about some new trendy buzzword is just ultimately a waste of time, since I will barely have mastered it before it's been replaced by the…
Yeah on the surface. $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH didn't catch on or it wouldn't be irrelevant but _why_ didn't it catch on? Powerbuilder failed, but was it because you couldn't write a good enough program that way on 1995s hardware? Or because it was ultimately a stupid idea?
Somebody like me who has never heard of Powerbuilder would have to look into the technology, which would take longer but it would prevent me from just dismissing it because "this has been done before".
Remember it isn't what you don't know that gets you, it is what you know for damn sure that just isn't so.
I am not saying this is the case for all old developers, but it would be my concern.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#50I am 55 and have been programming computers since 1975 when I was 15 years old. Do the math, I have been programming now for 40 years. Recently, I had a conversation with someone else about this topic and I told them that I have never been so excited about my career, the field of computer science, and most importantly the opportunities that exist today in the field of technology. The excitement surrounding too many t…
As someone in their late twenties who is just starting a career in programming, it makes me very, very happy to hear things like this.