171–180 of 244 posts
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> 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%.
The respect of your peers, presumably. The best gift I was ever given was to grow up on a farm. I'm doing way better than my peers.
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I'm not quite in the same age range, but north of 40, and have been doing this for > 20 years. The tech changes - I don't use BASIC or Z80 machine code day to day. The skills that I can speak to, and the skills I see from others with this level of experience, are problem solving and communication, and secondarily the confidence that comes from having made mistakes. Few projects fail miserably solely due to technical…
We younger folks are incredibly curious about what you've learned. Can you elaborate on the topics you mentioned or recommend other sources? Can you give tips on best practices?
The main thing I learned was to be able to look at code and determine if it was going to actually do what I wanted it to do without having to run it through the debugger a couple times.
It's important to spend time thinking about and reviewing code when edit, compile, and test cycles start to get long. There are a lot of instances where that still applies, such as with multi-threaded programming, integration testing or long running jobs.
I also learned the value of having muscle memory for APIs. Sure you can look things up in a jiffy, but actually rote memorizing stuff that is used often can speed development up.
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> 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. I am in the opposite side, I am also very excited about computer science so I focus now on sales and business development because I can earn much more than developing software. Now coding is a hobby again and a complementary knowledge to sales.
Interesting, how much can you make?
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…
Also 55, though didn't start programming until 1978. I love it, but I'm more apprehensive these days about being able to continue as the free-lancer I've been for the last ~15 years. I have a few biz ideas (and still riding one from 18 years ago that has made me a tad lazy), but sorely need a collaborator or two. Maybe I should do a graybeards Meetup group or something. Get some reverse-discrimination going...
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Am I the only one who noticed "he was in 13th Floor Elevators"? Whoa! That's rad! And props on making music the priority, not worrying about age.
No you're not. I'm listening to "You're Gonna Miss Me" right now. So is he in touch with Roky?
http://www.austinpsychfest.com/portfolio-item/the-13th-floor...
It's kind of funny... I just thought he was some random (occasionally iffy, somewhat nutty) drummer.
What is the gift that will keep on giving? Write about what you know. Write about your experiences and insights. Even thousands of years from now people may come across your work and given the advances they will be living amongst will almost certainly be interested in what you had to say.
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I can't imagine all the technologies and skills you guys have acquired. If I may derail the conversation a little bit, may I ask if/how you use the things you've learned today? I mean, is it things like paradigms that have stuck with you like OOP/functional/w\e, or do you always structure your exception handling in a certain way, no matter the language? Are there skills/technologies you've been using since you've sta…
Interesting the pattern in this thread - I'm 57 and started in 1973! There's plenty of languages I've used over the years that I have no use for today, or hardly even remember: Basic, FORTRAN, assembler, Pascal. None of those languages even had exception handling, so it's hard to say that it influenced my thinking on the subject, except by forcing me to be familiar with the alternatives. Today it's C++ and C# that pa…
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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…
As a young person my biggest concern with hiring old people is that exact attitude: this is just like $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH. 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 n…
Leaving aside the (substantial) ageism issues here, it looks to me like your reading of the GP's complaint is incorrect.
It's not a judgment that $NEW_TECH is going to not catch on or otherwise fail because it's just like $NOW_IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH.
It's the observation that much of the $NEW_TECH that catches on and succeeds for a time often turns out to offer approximately the same utility as $NOW_IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH... and similar adoption costs, which we pay over and over again. We rent rather than buy.
There are counterexamples I can think of -- new tools/abstractions/practices I've adopted that have resulted in near order-of-magnitude gains. But the ratio of these to other $NEW_TECH that just sort of shuffles the dirt around... well, that probably approaches another order-of-magnitude relationship.
And there's also the argument about the aggregation of marginal gains (see Brailsford and the British cycling team); approximately the same utility isn't quite the same thing as exactly the same utility and I don't think that should be overlooked. In fact, I think one could put together a specific case that the GP is arguably not correct in making an even comparison between Powerbuilder and webapps on precisely such a basis.
Still, an aggregation of marginal gains approach only ends up helpful if the marginal and opportunity costs are low.
How often do you find that's true for $NEW_TECH over $NOW_IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH?
And since we're being free with judgments about age here (generalizations, naturally -- not that you or I would ever let such general thinking affect our judgment when it comes to individuals)... do most young developers really have enough knowledge and experience to answer that question effectively?
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You should quit now, and try working a multitude of other jobs. Come back to us and see if your definition of 'trap' has changed, or expanded. Software engineering is such an entitled world, it is ridiculous. As someone who has seen the world of menial work, I will never, ever leave it. I feel blessed. You should too. You just don't know it.
I guess what I read into that is similar to how you can consider television a "trap". It's easy to get sucked into and not think about anything else. I know that I spend a lot of time thinking about different software related stuff, I love it, but I would suspect (and i could be wrong) that the cashier working at burger king doesn't think about how they can ring things up faster, move between the pickup window and th…
Low-wage jobs are their own cyclical trap, which can lead to not enough resources to improve your situation and apathy towards your day-to-day life. You can easily get stuck in a rut.