Thank you. 56 years old, still writing code. I enjoy working with young programmers, they bring energy and ideas to my projects and keep me from getting stale and stuck.
Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
181–190 of 192 posts
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#182I 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.
And highly variable. I have seen many folks as sharp as a tack well into their 80s, long after they have left the work force...
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully you lot took it as your own failure and not the poor intern dropped into the field with one of the most over complicated technologies and 'magical thinking' tooling.
Sure, we shouldn't have been so busy to not support our teammates. Still, I don't consider it a big failure. A lot of people go through life using technologies without really knowing how they work. He could have very well drag-n-dropped the soap endpoint and never learned a thing about soap. Now that he knows a bit about it he may alter his decisions in the future knowing the guts e.g. 'don't do that because it won't…
Fair enough. I was mostly concerned that it doesn't become a 'haha stupid interns' thread.
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#184Consider smartness as "what you can do with what you know," while experience is "what you know"--then, what follows is that having more experience makes up for not being as clever. Able to make good choices = Intellect * Experience Moreover, employers can _try_ to assess intelligence with whiteboard interviews...but the easier factor to evaluate is experience. It's right there on the resume!
Yeah, except 10 years at certain companies could teach you less than 6months to 1 year at one company that's actually doing it right. I hesitate to try and prescribe an answer for the "how employers should find good employees" question, because it's so difficult, but I imagine the ideal hiring process would: - Allow candidates a choice on how they want to be tested (take home thing, online code test, whiteboard, what…
> Yeah, except 10 years at certain companies could teach you less than 6months to 1 year at one company that's actually doing it right.
Is it common for programmers that have been on a job to not realize the ways in which their software sucks? Knowing what to avoid and the consequences of doing things wrong is an important factor of experience; additionally, maintaining a bad system gives insight into mitigating problems.
That said, I do agree that experience isn't just a passive function of time (as in "interest earned"). Instead, it's more like a landscape that needs to be explored (and to your point, some companies will allow a programmer to explore more productive areas).
> ...the equation you posted wouldn't the intellect variable be pretty much equal to experience, and you could make up for one with the other?
I suppose the answer to your question would depend on just how much variance you place on intellect. Is it:
- 0.0 (rock) to 1.0 (cleverest human on earth)
- 0.0 (rock) to 1.0 (cleverest intelligence across time and space)
Either way, I wouldn't take the equation too seriously--it was just a model to show a trend :/
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#185The most frustrating thing about being an older programmer is watching organizations make the same mistakes over and over again. Yeah, sure, you might want to hire an older guy because he has experience with the intangible project stuff. But only if you're planning to listen to him. I feel like Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day : Me: We need to create our security architecture in the beginning. It's always har…
I'm in my early 30s, so frequently called an older programmer and I've heard a lot of, "we don't have time". What I've been waking up to is that projects that estimate realistic budgets and time scales don't get funded. Everyone underbids knowing that the company/customer will continue to fund and extend deadlines for project after sinking so much effort into a buggy prototype, until the realistic estimate is reached…
Most of new features are useless, so it does not matter that they are buggy.
Only consistently useful features require bug-fixing. It is better to spend more time fixing bugs on few useful features after they implemented and tested by users, than spend time polishing all features (including useless features) up-front.
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I'm not sure if you're young or just playing devil's advocate, but a young person often feels that way. The whole knowledge * intellect idea that someone else here mentioned is far too reductive. You can be a ridiculously smart person who has read white papers and coding books, learned all about discrete math and project management, worked on as many projects as you could, and still not touch the maturity of an…
> As you age, you get to know yourself better. Is this true? I had a manager tell me once "when you're thirty, everything just starts to make sense" which I now know is total bullshit because I hit that milestone and there was no epiphany. I think the old have been bullshitting the young since the beginning of time. It's their right, but it's still bullshit. Having a lot to say doesn't make it worth hearing.
Yep, it is true. Points to consider:
- Your starting maturity makes a big difference. Not everybody is the same, and there's no shame in that.
- Not everybody is equally introspective. This is not a controversial statement. Not everybody is equally intelligent either, and the two things don't always correlate.
- Setting arbitrary, absolute chronological milestones on emotional maturity is dumb. I probably didn't learn to consistently have clean laundry on hand until I was in my early 30s. I also had a job where I regularly had to insert myself into life-or-death situations when I was just barely out of my teens, and I was damn good at it.
- The assertion that you wouldn't get better a better understanding of your vocation, workplaces, and how people work in general as you deal with them for decade-upon-decade seems a whole lot more outlandish than the counter-claim.
- People who claim to have it all figured out ARE full of shit. Life is a mountain, not a mesa.
- Things you've dealt with look deceptively easy to deal with when they're in the rear-view mirror.
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I'm not sure if you're young or just playing devil's advocate, but a young person often feels that way. The whole knowledge * intellect idea that someone else here mentioned is far too reductive. You can be a ridiculously smart person who has read white papers and coding books, learned all about discrete math and project management, worked on as many projects as you could, and still not touch the maturity of an…
"lack of experience is generally pretty opaque to the people who lack it" Agree! this is a succinct description of a eng management problem. However, it can be mitigated by hiring coachable, trainable (and mature) people. Interestingly, we've had great luck hiring from programming bootcamps; programmers who lack programming experience but have other work experience & who are eager and able to learn quickly, & usually…
Totally. I've also had good luck with people coming out of programming boot camps. In my current line of dev work, I'll take someone who's really eager to learn new things and jump on tasks over someone who can confidently invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Experience takes time. More or less, depending on several factors (willingness to learn and improve, complexity of the subject, ...). But by definition, if you gain experience, you just got older than before. You cannot magically learn everything out of sheer willpower. Additionally, a few things are impossible to learn without time: the "Judgement" section in the article. You can certainly theoretically understand t…
Ok, let me be more explicit. You are absolutely correct that experience takes time and that the type of experience that the author speaks of comes from writing something and supporting it. What I am saying, is that you can choose to write different types of things and support them, without having to become 40+ years old. Not out of "sheer willpower" either; you just have to choose to write different types of things a…
You think there's any stack that will last for 20 years?
In the last 20 years I've gone from writing desktop applications using RAD tools, to websites using no tools, to web apps using frameworks, to mobile apps using IDE's, to mobile apps using web app tools.
In the same period we've seen the rise and fall of Object Orientation, the fall and rise of Imperative/Structured Programming, and the burgeoning new age of Functional and Reactive/Declarative Programming.
Also Agile came and devolved back to Scrum Only, and waterfall never stopped being the default.
All version control systems got converted to Git.
SQL fell out of fashion for being too complex and then everyone worked out why all that complexity was needed.
You can't be in this industry for 20 years and work on one stack writing the same sort of applications ;) Maybe five years, tops.
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you think age happens if not by way of time? :)
It does not take 20 years to gain the experience the author is discussing. It can be done in significantly less time than that. That is my point.
I'd love to hear your ideas for how to do that...?
Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I had to abandon the "keep knowledge in my head" paradigm in 1990 or so and shift to the "problem solver" model. This is the skill set with an indeterminate shelf life. Sure it takes time to become fluent in new systems. That's no different than the first system that I learned. I think if one lacks the willingness to stretch and learn the new, whether one is 25 or one is 70, that is when one becomes unsuitable for th…
> I had to abandon the "keep knowledge in my head" paradigm in 1990 or so and shift to the "problem solver" model.
That is what I aspire to. I think I'm doing well in this regard for how far I am into my career, but any advice you have in this regard would be appreciated by me (and others presumably).