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Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

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Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#151

Post by vim_user »

dwc wrote: post #100
rdtsc wrote: post #41

Reason to hire a young programmer based on the confession from CTO: we like college grads because we can drive them hard and pay them minimal salaries. The only thing is they burn out pretty quickly. And yes they also lamented the quality of their software and how releases were buggy and delayed. Not sure they saw a connection there... To attract the candidates they optimized non-salary benefits they thought college…

> Not sure they saw a connection there... In my experience, they try not to see the connection. If you try to show it, they'll listen for a bit and then rationalize. If you keep at it you'll begin to see irritation and even aggression. That a fair number of CTOs have a decent technical background doesn't seem to help much, somehow. I've had this confirmed personally when I got together with a coworker from almost 20…

I also have that theory, and it's not a stretch since the act of business is to commoditize everything. I especially saw it in the IT consulting business.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#152

Post by QuantumGravy »

timwaagh wrote: post #113
js8 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If employable programmers are as rare as brilliant young mathematicians, we have a serious problem.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#153

Post by lliamander »

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…

It's not just about cognitive decline, but about how quickly our knowledge becomes obsolete. Tech is a very fashion-driven industry right now, and deep knowledge is sometimes (often?) valued less than ability to pick up the latest trend.

There are skill sets that have a longer shelf-life, but developing those skills (and finding jobs that actually need those skills) is a challenge.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#154

Post by altano »

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.

Can't tell if trolling...

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#155

Post by pc86 »

Clubber wrote: post #131
pc86 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A programmer with 20 years of experience is definitely worth more than a programmer with 2 years of experience. But not that much more. A skilled architect with 8-10 years of experience will beat a programmer with 25 or 30 years experience every day in terms of ongoing business value, and will command a much higher salary (15-20% or more). So yes, you can absolutely have a professionally rewarding, lucrative career a…

Job titles are meaningless. When I say 20 year programmer, it's what you would call an architect, senior engineer, whatever. The programmer being someone who doesn't do any design is a foreign concept to me and should find another career. Any architect that doesn't write at least the skeleton code is the same. All levels of that career needs to involve design and implementation of that design.

Every company I've worked at with 2 or more developers has acknowledged a difference between a developer responsible for high level architecture and technical ownership of a system(s) who happens to program some of that system as well, and a developer responsible for programming parts of that system who happens to architect smaller self-contained pieces of it.

Architecting a class or small single-use library is a subset of the skill required to architect a distributed system, a large multi-tenant application, or some other non-closed system.

Whether you want them to have the same job title or not is I think orthogonal to the fact that they are very different jobs.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#156

Post by btschaegg »

snarfy wrote: post #118
kageneko wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-d…

Not saying that is necessarily the case, but situations like this can also develop if you have a lot of basic knowlege (especially regarding tooling) that is neither documented properly nor spread amongst most of the team.

I've had scenarios where I spent an afternoon building a little one-off application I needed for some specific debugging task only to be told a month or so later that someone already built a proper tool for that - but only one developer knew about it, and it was stored in a different repository I had no access to.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#157

Post by Clubber »

pc86 wrote: post #155
Clubber wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job titles are meaningless. When I say 20 year programmer, it's what you would call an architect, senior engineer, whatever. The programmer being someone who doesn't do any design is a foreign concept to me and should find another career. Any architect that doesn't write at least the skeleton code is the same. All levels of that career needs to involve design and implementation of that design.

Every company I've worked at with 2 or more developers has acknowledged a difference between a developer responsible for high level architecture and technical ownership of a system(s) who happens to program some of that system as well, and a developer responsible for programming parts of that system who happens to architect smaller self-contained pieces of it. Architecting a class or small single-use library is a sub…

I think you are trying to differentiate between a programmer with 20 years experience and what you call an architect by using titles. Like I said titles are meaningless. A programmer with 20 years experience who can't design a large system isn't a very good programmer. An architect who can't design a large system isn't a very good programmer either.

I think we are arguing the same thing, we're just stuck on the semantics of titles. I guess let me put it this way, do you know people who have the title of programmer who are way better at building systems than a guy with the title of architect? Of course. Some companies don't even use the title of architect. That certainly doesn't mean no one in the shop can design a large system. It's not the title, it's the ability, and titles are a horrible way to discern ability.

>A programmer with 20 years of experience is definitely worth more than a programmer with 2 years of experience. But not that much more.

This is what I took issue with. A (good) programmer with 20 years experience is capable of designing large scale systems, which is much more valuable than a programmer with 2 years experience. Maybe it's just my bias.

When I first heard the term "architect," I asked, "what is that?" and the reply was, "someone who designs large systems but doesn't code." I thought to myself "well that's dumb." FWIW, I've had the title of "architect" at various companies since 2008 and I've always coded at least the skeleton of my designs. I mean how else do you know if you're right? When I switched companies in 2010, the new company didn't have the title "architect," so I was just a "senior engineer," until we got acquired. I regained the title "architect" because I made X amount of money. Like I said, meaningless. As a side note, I think coders calling themselves engineers is also incorrect. Engineering is a specific discipline that actually has meaning. It's like Dr. Dre. It sounds good, but I sure ain't going to see him for a rash.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#158

Post by charlieflowers »

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…

git is a good litmus test. If they're old and refuse to use it, they're probably a close-minded dinosaur.

If they like git and know it well, they're probably old, full of the experience and benefits you're looking for, _and_ energetic, growing and open-minded.

(I said "probably" because it's not perfect. But it's a pretty good heuristic).

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#159

Post by js8 »

lliamander wrote: post #153
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…

It's not just about cognitive decline, but about how quickly our knowledge becomes obsolete. Tech is a very fashion-driven industry right now, and deep knowledge is sometimes (often?) valued less than ability to pick up the latest trend. There are skill sets that have a longer shelf-life, but developing those skills (and finding jobs that actually need those skills) is a challenge.

> but about how quickly our knowledge becomes obsolete

I kind of expected that argument to come up. It's funny that the reaction of the industry itself to that is to give up on the experience and ride with the fashion, rather than fight those trends.

It's almost as if immaturity is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#160

Post by pacaro »

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.

Lots of people think that the answer is "badly", but we don't really know. My personal experience (I'm 44) is that I've been offered every job I've interviewed for, passed every phone screen etc.

Many older developers of my acquaintance are happy where they are, they just don't move very often.

With newcomers to the industry we see a reasonable cross section, but with more experience, the sample becomes confounded by many other factors.

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