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Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

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Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#111

Post by timwaagh »

emodendroket wrote: post #85
timwaagh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

programmers actually need to think sometimes. the jobs mentioned are more routine and rely on soft skills and experience a lot. I do not mean any disrespect by that. mathematicians are also best when they are young, but unlike programmers work in academia and get to teach until retirement, whereas programmers get replaced.

Doctors don't need to think? Come on, man.

they do but it is not the same thing at all. we need to think for hours, finding the right algorithm to compute something. doctors need to make the right decision in very little time based on their experience and knowledge.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#112

Post by sotojuan »

js8 wrote: post #50

I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40. If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody…

> Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40.

If anything, these careers (aside from doctor maybe) hit their peak in their 40s or early 50s. I would say our culture thinks programmers peak in their late 20s/early 30s.

For HN users in their 30s - what are you doing to not get ageism'd?

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#113

Post by timwaagh »

js8 wrote: post #97
timwaagh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

programmers actually need to think sometimes. the jobs mentioned are more routine and rely on soft skills and experience a lot. I do not mean any disrespect by that. mathematicians are also best when they are young, but unlike programmers work in academia and get to teach until retirement, whereas programmers get replaced.

> mathematicians are also best when they are young This guy springs to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Babai Because, yeah, programmers and mathematicians don't actually need any experience, they can just think everything up on the spot! I also wonder how you imagine that other professions gain their experience, if they don't need to think.

it is a historical fact that most of the best mathematicians make their famous discoveries when they are younger than 30. if you have studied the subject, you'd know this, so i assume you just dislike these facts and argue for the sake of it.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#114

Post by sotojuan »

quickben wrote: post #79
autokad wrote: post #8

How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.

We do awesome (36 here). 1. Because I've had many interviews where people ask one of perhaps 200 questions over and over (reverse a double linked list, serialize a tree). 2. I do complicated stuff, daily . Multithreaded communications patterns. Cross platform code. Memory / performance optimizations. Etc. All syntax from plain C to C++14 plus extensions. When I have to do a basic data structure operation, on a single…

> I do complicated stuff, daily. Multithreaded communications patterns. Cross platform code. Memory / performance optimizations. Etc. All syntax from plain C to C++14 plus extensions. When I have to do a basic data structure operation, on a single thread, it's actually relaxing.

What about those who don't? Plenty of programming jobs don't require this kind of stuff, at least not everyday. These kind of jobs that keep your mind fresh are the most desirable as you get older, but they're limited.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#115

Post by Clubber »

Mouse47 wrote: post #74
ruffel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…

Yup. I've seen 55+ year old programmers write what was essentially a message queue persisted in a database table, processed by a cron job. We frequently had problems with duplicate processing of messages, due to multiple cron jobs running at once. I've personally argued against a key-value store schema in SQL Server and was in favor of a flat-table design. In our case, there were records of different 'types', and eac…

>All of the business logic was in stored procedures. I've seen a stored procedure with triple nested cursors spanning 2000 lines. Our 'senior' developer would take weeks to make changes to this thing.

I'm and old programmer and I've been arguing against business logic in SPs since SQL Server 6.5 and have been losing ever since. That's not an old/young argument.

It's because vendors (in this case MS) recommend putting code in SPs. I suspect it has to do with lock-in. I use the database for what it was made for, and only what it was made for: to persist and retrieve data. Anything else should be in the code.

Also, key/value schemas are terrible and slow, but sometimes they're the only way to get the dynamic nature of what you are doing. The best compromise I've seen of that is to have the values you know are going to be used a lot by groups/customers flat, then have the key/value schema for anything oddball.

I guess the moral of the story is old/young doesn't really matter. It's know / don't know what you are doing. I guess it boils down to thinking about what you are doing. Key value is very dynamic but I'll bet it's slow. Do we need fast more than dynamic? Is there a compromise that will satisfy both requirements? Many people don't think that deeply and just want to get it finished.

When I was young, the dot bomb was the "great filter." After that, there were a lot more people who knew what they were doing because they survived. It sucked though, I don't recommend it.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#116

Post by caseydurfee »

timwaagh wrote: post #76
js8 wrote: post #50

I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40. If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody…

programmers actually need to think sometimes. the jobs mentioned are more routine and rely on soft skills and experience a lot. I do not mean any disrespect by that. mathematicians are also best when they are young, but unlike programmers work in academia and get to teach until retirement, whereas programmers get replaced.

Are you sure the jobs that rely on soft skills and experience are more routine than other jobs? What experience do you have to support that?

I've found that once you throw humans into the mix, nothing is routine. I think CS schools do their grads a huge disservice by creating the expectation that the coding is the hard part.

There are a lot of people who can reverse a linked list who can't coordinate a huge project, or build a product from the ground up that people care about. If those are soft skills (implying they're less challenging to pick up), why do most engineers only develop them after they're pretty skilled technically?

In my experience, it's not because they're forced to in order to make up for declining mental horsepower. It's because what you're calling the "hard skills" have become routine to them, and they want to do harder things than they can accomplish as an individual contributor. They want to do work that's less routine.

Why label soft skills as "not thinking"? Humans are way more complex than computers.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#117

Post by mmmpop »

js8 wrote: post #50

I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40. If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody…

Hey great career idea for extreme over-achievers: write software until you're 35 but in the meantime study full-time as a thoracic surgeon. By the time you're "done" or "washed up" (according to some recruiter who does...??), you're the right age to start your career as a doctor that I'd probably not want cutting into me for a few more years.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#118

Post by snarfy »

kageneko wrote: post #51
ruffel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…

In my experience, growing older, I've found both of these generalizations to be true in myself. There are plenty of times that I've watched junior developers make literally the exact same mistakes I made 10 years ago. At the same time, I've learned that technology has continued to move on and things that were wrong 10 years ago may not be wrong today. I remember when I started out that I'd scour every line of code fo…

This reminds me of an intern that recently went through our company.

A part of his summer project was to make some api calls to a soap endpoint. We were all very busy so he tried to be as self sufficient as possible and not ask questions. After about a week, he comes to me with questions about soap xml schema and implementation details.

He did not understand it's already built into the tooling. You literally drag-n-drop a url endpoint into your project and get a proxy class for calling the soap endpoint. He was way off into the weeds trying to finish his project. A little guidance helps.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#119

Post by mmmpop »

adrianN wrote: post #65
js8 wrote: post #50

I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40. If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody…

Cognitive decline is real but you have to balance it with the increase in experience.

No chance I can do math in my head nearly as well at 30 as I could at even 25, but I can't count the other areas I have improved in that seem to mean so much more as an adult and as a professional.

For example, I couldn't learn other languages so well as a teenager (I wasn't such a great grammarist with English either). As an adult I've picked up French rather quickly and grown fascinated by linguistics; hard to understate the positive effects this has had on my career and even social life. Take all of that and the real-world job experience, add it to the calc and CS coursework from university and I'm 100x the developer I was 5 years ago.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#120

Post by quickben »

kzisme wrote: post #103
quickben wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do awesome (36 here). 1. Because I've had many interviews where people ask one of perhaps 200 questions over and over (reverse a double linked list, serialize a tree). 2. I do complicated stuff, daily . Multithreaded communications patterns. Cross platform code. Memory / performance optimizations. Etc. All syntax from plain C to C++14 plus extensions. When I have to do a basic data structure operation, on a single…

Have you always had a job solving more complex problems, or is it just your current position that allows you to solve such problems?

It sort of build up to this. Each job more complicated than the previous one.

Then again, I actually really love what I'm doing. So that helps.

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