171–180 of 361 posts
More for the rest of us. If you're too old for most startups to look twice at your resume, apply to CircleCI: https://circleci.com/jobs . We value experience, and our backend is even written in Lisp [1]. [1] As we all know, all greybeards use Lisp ;)
Experience is a liability. You learn all kinds of things as an engineer that quickly become obsolete. Even in the web environment. If you're still worried about hasLayout or rounding corners with images, or god forbid using tables for layout, or even setting explicit widths on your web pages instead of responsive media queries, you're adhering to obsolete ways of doing things that are hurting you more than helping. E…
Using tables lets me put things on the page just where the heck I want them. I don't know of any easier way with HTML or CSS, and I'm not going to write any JavaScript -- won't do that. Having all my pages just 800 pixels wide is just what I want for my view of a good UI/UX for my Web site. And the Web pages should look okay on everything with a Web browser right up to date as of, say, five years ago. So, I'm not going to test my pages on several versions of each of several Web browsers on each of several devices and, with such simple Web pages likely don't have to. And I have no pop ups, pull downs, roll overs, or anything else that has the screen change just do to mouse movements or anything else except deliberate user actions.
That's the way I want the pages to be at least for now.
Much of my early career success can be attributed to working with many senior engineers who taught me a lot very quickly, given their knowledge and experience.
There is also reverence/nostalgia for "pioneers" in my field. It's fun to tease them about punchcards, but it's also great to hear their stories about their experiences when they first started as programmers.
Then again I'm 33 so my opinion no longer matters.
The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…
Not so much. I'm 35, started programming at about 10 in my TI99-4A, typing games from magazines, etc. the usual stuff. No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me in general programming, unless he was working at Microsoft or IBM at that date, and surely they are about less than 10000 of those guys in the world. Of course there are 40 year olds that may have way more experience than me in a specific language…
I dunno. I can think of three ways in which an older developer might have a hard time finding a job: (1) If someone doesn't keep up with currently relevant technology, they will find themselves without the job skills that employers are looking for, regardless of whatever other qualities they may have. This isn't ageism. (2) If someone works at the same place for 10+ years, getting raises every year and becoming more…
I dunno. I can think of three ways in which an older developer might have a hard time finding a job: (1) If someone doesn't keep up with currently relevant technology, they will find themselves without the job skills that employers are looking for, regardless of whatever other qualities they may have. This isn't ageism. (2) If someone works at the same place for 10+ years, getting raises every year and becoming more…
Perhaps the question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like. Let's assume for a minute that the age bias is important and useful. Why is that? More importantly, what could we do to facilitate an increase in creativity or productivity or 'talent' over time? The fact that we don't has a huge impact on the kinds of things society achieve. I don't think it's correct to ju…
In my opinion I think it's just the free time to be able to put in the number of hours of deliberate practice. When you are younger you have far more time and flexibility to learn and experiment. In addition that time is spent on things that are seen to be new/better/modern and also come with a certain distain for doing things the way your predecessors did it. This mix gives the young person the flexibility of cuttin…
I'm a 40+ engineer in the NYC metro area and I've never felt more in-demand in my life! I think it boils down to a simple idea: computer-science is a dynamic field and THE FUN PART is that you need to always be learning. There are still some colleagues my age who still wax about the days of writing JCL for their mainframe jobs and never evolved past the 80's and perhaps they gave a bad name for others who built on th…
I'm curious about the "high throughput" part of your comment. Does that mean rapid development? Lots of lines written? or what? I find the older I get, the slower I produce code. I spend more time thinking about the solution than coding the solution. This tends to frustrate my employers, who follow the "move fast and break things" philosophy. They think I shouldn't have to think about it, just do it. So, I guess what…
If it's incurring a similar bug load and just gets done slower, that's a problem and they're right to be upset.
I've seen both cases before, even from very experienced people, so it's very specific to the situation.