Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

I don't think you "keep the same pace". A lot of what I do now is, paradoxically, not doing things, until I'm internally ready to start work.

But I think more than this, people need to understand why experience counts. Here is my opinion on the matter:

You can hire somebody young and they will probably be willing to work longer than an older person and probably get the job done sufficiently well, at a cheaper rate.

For many one-shot jobs, this is fine. But if you want to build something at scale, and have it be maintainable, and reduce your long term technical debt, you should get someone who has fought these battles before and understands the best way to take them on.

I'm speaking from the same experience that many others will: when we look at our younger selves, we realize how little we knew about organizing and maintaining a large project. Even as I age, I realize the me of just 3 years ago was relatively naive with regard to certain high-level tasks.

So, its not just about the hours you put in, how fast you can do competitive coding, and so forth. It is about the more nebulous parts of coding, the larger scope, the organization of a complex system. There is only one way to learn these things, the hard way: lots of time, lots of scars, etc.

You hate where people are close-minded so you're _sticking_ with the countryside..? It's possible that NH countryside is different than the other small towns I've visited, but I have zero data points on that. Another discussion, another day.

I lived in SF for five years and performed a couple of hundred interviews for the companies I consulted with. Software engineers have the capability to produce millions of dollars in profits with the right product. People can quickly get over prejudices if they think you will be able to produce that million dollar product.

Keeping up with the startup Jones's is about relevancy. No one wants a senior engineer barking at them babbling about how "Smalltalk did the same thing 20 years ago and now we're just reinventing the wheel!".

Do yourself a favor in the interview; do a bake off of old style vs new stack implementations. Compare and contrast. It shows your vast knowledge. And it quickly graduates you from grumpy old programmer to a mentor for the entire team.

New web/mobile based companies start all the time in SF, and with each new fresh start comes the chance to wipe the slate clean and choose a newer stack that may provide a competitive advantage. Reactjs with redux right now, but probably something different in a year. New companies. New choice of stacks, all the time. The tides change quickly in SF.

If you've been turned down by a Bay Area startup, I guarantee it's much less to do with your lack of skinny jeans or because you have some grey hairs..

P.S. Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45.

You may have a team of fresh-out-of-Berkley-engineers and that's it. If you're not comfortable in a mentor setting, you may also get rejected. At a later stage in your career and with a young team, you're expected to contribute more than code.

In a job, I want to do one thing - to get as close as possible to defect-free, correctly operating code, on time and under budget. If you're not into that, I'll find someone who is.

Good metrics are impossible ( for now and for the forseeable - they may be congruent with the set of techniques for proving programs correct ) so it comes down to trust.

In a follow-up post, you said that you don't want to spend all your time in front of a screen. Well, I work for places where management is mostly sane, and panics are few. I work 40 hours a week with very rare exceptions. Outside of that, I have a life that doesn't involve staring at screens. It has actual humans in it (plus a dog and a cat).

It sounds like you want to be retired by fifty. Well, I didn't plan well enough for that. Part of that is health issues of some people around me - they need my income, they have some doctor bills, they can't eat garbage so their food is somewhat more expensive. I'd prefer it to be otherwise, but I'm not going to walk away from them. So I need money, and programming pays pretty well.