Not that I condone treachery, but growing up my father used to have a famous line "Old age and treachery will beat out youth and enthusiasm any day". And although he wasn't a programmer, but rather an investigative thinker, his subtle manner of obtaining voluntary compliance seemed to win the day. Whilst not treachery in the blatant sense, there was allot to learn from this wisdom which is only gained from life experience. Would I have hired Doug, probably, but I think maybe I would have been better self-served being HIRED by Doug. My age - 43 and irrelevant IMO.
I would have hired Doug, but...
101–110 of 244 posts
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I see too many older developers who complain about ageism, but what's really going on is that they're essentially the same developer they were 2-3 years into their career. If you've been working in the industry for over 20 years, employers can and should expect that you've made the most of it. Those developers have very few problems with ageism. It's the ones that have become comfortable and stagnated that have…
I'm not a programmer anymore, so I don't have a horse in this race, but I cringe when people exhort older programmers to "stay current." If you're spending your free time learning about distributed databases, machine learning, cryptography--fields that existed in the 1990's but are more relevant and developed today because of the web--you're becoming a better programmer. If you're figuring out the latest "compile to…
I am in the middle of these two groups. Often "Stay current", "It's different with modern ideas/methods", etc... Expressions commonly used by people who want to ignore the lessons that other people had to learn the hard way. Ironically claiming they claim the old person is out of touch. When in reality they are trying to prevent newbies from repeating the past.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get your point and agree with it. I've said it many times myself. But people don't think in terms of mastering a craft and spending a productive life practicing it. In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. In that sense most engineering fields are "traps" because if you stay an engineer you aren't going any further up the ladder. I'm a craftsperson, and I still practice the cra…
> In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. And what, exactly, is it that you're losing? You can have a pretty damn fine life without getting anywhere near the 1%.
It was not a statement about my personal feelings, but rather what I think the common perception is.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#104I was looking at some of the code for one of his projects that is a little node http server. I don't really know JS or node at all, but can someone explain this to me:
function secondsSince (when) {
var now = new Date ();
when = new Date (when);
return ((now - when) / 1000);
}
Or this is just a very case specific function and the input is already sanitized in a way that is prepared for this function?
github is here: https://github.com/scripting/pagepark/blob/master/lib/utils....
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#105I 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…
Just have to say how encouraging this thread has been. I'm 37 and have been thinking about what my career looks like when I'm "old" :-) Thanks for giving us relative rookies some hope.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#106"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…
Something I've found as I've gotten older, though, is that I have a stronger and stronger sense of wasted time every time I have to learn a new way of doing the same thing. Particularly if the new way involves a bleeding edge leaky abstraction.
Because every hour I spend investing in a new stack and its details is an hour I can't spend thinking about product-level details, can't spend learning more learning about organizational-level matters, can't spend on improving more timeless investments like statistics, math, and soft/interpersonal skills. Not to mention fun things like music and travel and enjoying the company of people you like.
It wouldn't be so bad if most of the new shiny things in the software world were an order of magnitude better. But saying that 1/4 new frameworks or even languages present tha kind of power/productivity jump would be optimistic.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#107"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…
I don't see that at all. I started out when "structured programming" and "recursion" were both exciting concepts. OO came along and over a ten year period went from "useful for UI" to "the One Ring To Rule Them All" and while the shine wore off a bit, it really did help.
Today Functional Programming is introducing all kinds of new ideas and approaches, and while I often find FP people over-earnest and irritating, I'm still able to recognize that they offer something new, even if it isn't all they think it is.
Impure functional languages like Haskell have shown that it's possible to get many of the advantages of a purely functional language while still being able to implement side-effects, which is an amazingly cool trick despite Haskeller's annoying insistance that their side-effect-ful "language" is "purely functional" even if they have to redefine "language" to make it true.
This is true of all the supposedly "pure" functional languages, which universally come with caveats that amount to "disregarding all the sex I've had, I am a virgin", but that's just a somewhat off-putting quirk of the community. The languages themselves are full of interesting ideas that are being adopted by less purity-obsessed languages, and this is a good thing in the same way that the OO-purism of SmallTalk drove other more mainstream languages to adopt OO ideas and bring them in adulterated form to the unwashed masses (which had the nice side-effect of driving the purists nuts, and who doesn't want to see that?)
So I personally get the feeling that it's a great time to be alive and active as a software developer. We're barely out of the "bash rocks together to make hammer-like-thing" era of programming, and we get to be part of the most explosive growth phase of the most important technological growth curve in human history: the algorithmization of work.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#108I was looking at some of the code for one of his projects that is a little node http server. I don't really know JS or node at all, but can someone explain this to me: function secondsSince (when) { var now = new Date (); when = new Date (when); return ((now - when) / 1000); } I'm assuming now returns seconds since some fixed point in time ( epoch ) when when someone passes in the 'when' argument, it must already be…
It'll work with any Javascript Date object (passing a Date to the Date constructor just gets you a new object with the same value) or any other value that works in the Date constructor:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
>requiring special mechanical keyboard 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?
He speaks truth, i am one such youngster programmer/gamer. Mechanical keyboard FTW.
Re: I would have hired Doug, but...
#110I was looking at some of the code for one of his projects that is a little node http server. I don't really know JS or node at all, but can someone explain this to me: function secondsSince (when) { var now = new Date (); when = new Date (when); return ((now - when) / 1000); } I'm assuming now returns seconds since some fixed point in time ( epoch ) when when someone passes in the 'when' argument, it must already be…
see the Mozilla JavaScript docs here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
a Date can be constructed with either a number of milliseconds since the epoch or a string in a format recognised by the Date.parse() method (IETF-compliant RFC 2822 timestamps and also a version of ISO8601)