This doesn't have to be true. Goethe managed to stay fresh his entire life - even the poetry he wrote in his late years was seen as expanding the art form; if the mind ossifies over the years it's probably because one has grown complacent and stopped expanding, rejuvenating, overcoming oneself. A categorical statement about age is just an excuse, IMHO.
Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
111–120 of 231 posts
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#112I'm a 25 year-old former Marine who thought he could take a shot at being a programmer when he exited the military. I never had any background in programming other than being interested in UNIX and Linux at a young age, so CS seemed like the logical choice for someone who had a GI bill to burn. 2 years and a lot of classes later, I'm realizing I'm too old to compete at this gig, and I should have started when I was 1…
Yeah, the glamour goes quick, that's for sure. But when it goes it reveals the bones of the thing, and that can be good. A fast learner and thorough problem solver will find work in programming, IMHO, competition be damned.
Personally, I didn't learn very much in my college CS studies (incidentally, I was also in Marine Corps ROTC at the time at VA Tech). My cofounder, who studied at UCLA, whistles a very different tune, but I don't think his education has been a determining factor in his success as a programmer. I think that for me, the missing impetus was money: once coding became about a paycheck and an actual customer, that's when I began to love it. Pure theory just doesn't turn me on. You might consider that what you're lacking isn't education, but motivation: find a good problem to solve, and fill in the blanks of your skills from there.
All this to say, starting at a young age is not the sole determining factor of success in programming, and having a CS degree may not get you where you want to go. Recommendation: if it's possible for you financially, apply to a startup whose mission you find compelling, lie brazenly on your résumé, and take the risk of being fired.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#113He seems to have missed making the point in the title. Why would software engineers work for english majors? He thinks that a 20 something english major is a better manager for a software engineer than a 40 something software engineer? Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses. I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on tech…
Another point to bear in mind is that us programmers can be a vain lot and since it is possible to be highly successful in software very early in your career. This can mean you will be put in a position of doing the hiring early on. We will naturally prefer someone younger and greener than us that we can mentor rather than hire someone 10 years our senior who's experience we might find threatening.
I see this all the time, and I think it's the least useful way to further your own career. Sure, I understand that notion of the power grab, but why? What real world benefit will you see by asserting unearned power over a new hire.
Much better to hire someone who you can learn from, someone who perhaps can mentor you, and help you actually achieve more in your career.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#114I hate it when places like Bloomberg purport to tell me what is going to happen with the rest of my career. I will be 32 at the end of this week, and you know what? I am not stopping this programming thing anytime soon. This article is written for the people that would get into our craft based on the fact that Software Engineer was just named the top job. If you love to build, if you love to create, if you love to program then you will be fine. You set the expiration date of that, not your age.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#115Regarding the Facebook preference for hiring young people...
The "young" developers today are those who grew up with the sorts of stacks that start-ups today are being built on. The 1.0 release of ROR was late 2005. If you were hacking away at 12 years old in 2005 then you would be 19 today!
Learning the web dev stack is a lot of effort, especially if you throw Linux in with that. Most people generally don't want to put in the time / effort to do new things. That's even more true of people who have families and busy lives.
Also, it's the web dev stack that is bringing down the barriers to entry for starting new businesses. Things like dirt cheap server resources and cloud services are even more recent than Ruby 1.0.
No wonder it's all young people! It's the young people who grew up with this stuff and who don't have to be stuffed into the old molds of work and education. For example, I'm a U.S. citizen working from the Philippines just for a change of scenery. Perhaps I could have been able to do this 10 years ago, but probably not much earlier than that.
This train is moving fast. Quit reading these articles because nobody can predict where we are going. It's getting crazy.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#116> Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40. Really? What statistics? And where do these statistics show the developers going? People don't just dry up and blow away at 40. They move to managerial positions. They start their own companies. They stay in jobs longer, so while you might see fewer of them being hired, that doesn't mean they're not still working in the field. And there a…
I think you touched on the core of the issue here. How much has the market grown on the past 20 years? Quite a lot actually. As the market grows, more people gravitate towards it as a career choice, and they are mostly young people looking for career choices. 20 years from now, those people will be seniors in a highly competitive market where solutions grow in technical complexity day after day.
The only thing certain is that things will have changed by them from what they are currently.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#117I'm a 25 year-old former Marine who thought he could take a shot at being a programmer when he exited the military. I never had any background in programming other than being interested in UNIX and Linux at a young age, so CS seemed like the logical choice for someone who had a GI bill to burn. 2 years and a lot of classes later, I'm realizing I'm too old to compete at this gig, and I should have started when I was 1…
The truth is, programming is honestly not so hard. It just seems that way to you because it's so easy to convince yourself of that. I want to emphatically remind you that it's not. You have to believe that it's not hard before you can get good at it.
And it doesn't help that programming courses, like much of school, sometimes suck the excitement and imagination right out of you while simultaneously instilling fear.
Forget that, and just start coding. Anything! It really doesn't matter what. The only way to get good it programming is to program a lot. It doesn't matter if what you make is good, well-written, useful to anybody (even yourself), etc. Find something interesting to you for whatever reason, and just start programming--start now and don't stop--and you will become proficient way faster than you realize is possible.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#118In this case you cannot really look at current practices and predict the future. For many of us in the "new programmer" category now, we will see an exponentially increasing lifespan as well as several other improved aspects of health and intelligence. In the limit, this may lead to age having almost no meaning. Besides, English Majors?! I dare say that english shouldn't even be a major. A great academic in any field…
"A great academic in any field should be articulate in expressing ideas, in at least one language."
The idea that English departments exist primarily to produce skilled writers is a misconception. 'English' as an academic field is the study of English-language literature, and it's as serious and rigorous as any other field in the humanities.
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#119Peace out guys - this is awesome for existing SEs (but maybe not good for the economy)
Re: Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors
#120I'm a 25 year-old former Marine who thought he could take a shot at being a programmer when he exited the military. I never had any background in programming other than being interested in UNIX and Linux at a young age, so CS seemed like the logical choice for someone who had a GI bill to burn. 2 years and a lot of classes later, I'm realizing I'm too old to compete at this gig, and I should have started when I was 1…
This may seem like another one of those trite responses you mentioned, but I would second the notion that "you can do anything you put your mind to" and that you should keep up the program, or at least keep learning CS on your own. If you look to put degree notches on your belt and list languages you know on your resume, you're looking at things the wrong way. Build things! Get excited about what you can build--anything! The more CS you know, the faster you can learn more. If you want to be inspired by some of the applications out there for your talents, try taking one of the awesome free courses at Udacity (or Coursera) and add Python to your list of known languages while you're at it. You can do them at your own pace (I would lump together 3 or 4 classes and just muscle through them when I had a free weekend) and learn from some of the smartest teachers out there.
Even in an elite university, programming isn't something that's taught to you. You teach it to yourself by doing and digging. What university can do is give some structure to what material you get through and ensure a higher level understanding of some of the concepts (and it's probably a better environment for learning the math and statistics that are useful for any computer scientist).
Anyway, don't defeat yourself and don't underestimate how critical this knowledge will be in 10, 15, 25 years when the world will be a whole new place filled with much much more software. The human mind is incredibly plastic and with the proper enthusiasm can be melded to serve nearly any purpose :)