211–220 of 265 posts
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Most algorithms are reusable, while most GUI code is not. Hence, most actual programming is happening on GUIs.
Hm, depends on the business, I guess. Because from my experience, most business algorithms are proprietary and don’t have proper specifications. You can’t just use them somewhere else. You have to recreate them from scratch.
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True, but companies don't care about those things, really, even in the supposedly developer-centric Bay Area. Just browse through any jobs thread or board, even (especially) the "Who's Hiring" HN thread. You're going to see a lot of "We're looking for an X developer" or "we're looking for a developer with Y years of experience in Stack X." Employers, even supposedly knowledgeable tech centric ones, routinely think th…
It's because most of the who's hiring on HN posts are small 2-3 people startups that desperately need a new programmer.. yesterday. They're not a team that can afford to bring someone up to speed, even if that person is amazing in programming other things. Which is really unfortunate.
A lot of older programmers seem to think they have 20 years of experience, when they only have the same year of experience 20 times. If you don't keep up to date and current, it's not ageism.
You represent the other extreme with your comment. Very few software projects have more than two or three years of "experience fertility," for the kind of experience you mean. There's a difference between someone who can't even last a year to get a project from prototype to some semblance of maturity and someone who wants to move on after one to two years when a project reaches the point at which maintenance overtake…
Maintenance work is easy, less time consuming, and frankly mostly requires less effort. If you fall into that trap, and end up maintaining a large system that is slowly becoming obsolete, you're not building up more skills.
A lot of older workers (and I am one of them) end up doing that cause that's the easy path, the one requiring no effort at all. And that leads you to becoming unemployable.
A lot of older programmers seem to think they have 20 years of experience, when they only have the same year of experience 20 times. If you don't keep up to date and current, it's not ageism.
A lot of younger programmers seems to think they have 3 years of experience, when they only have the same month of experience 36 times.
Experience is made up by the experiences you had, if you have never worked in a proper environment or never actually tried to improve your craft, years doesn't matter much.
And the myth of "being up to date", it can mean different things for different people. Sadly sometimes it just means that you need to have played with the latest fad that will disappear in a few years. In that case i'd prefer someone that's not up to date but can learn something different and it's used to do things the proper way.
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If you can't play video games with your friend/coworkers from times to times, then your life suck, kids or not.
I'm not a gamer.
So far we've really enjoyed:
* speedrunners
* towerfall
* blazerush
fun:
* lovers in a dangerous spacetime
* overcooked
* miner warfare
* clusterpuck 99 (sucks if you're not > 4)
* hidden in plain sight
* Magicka
that were fun, but got boring fast:
* duck game
* CMYW
* trine 2
* starwhal
* Nidhogg
* Porcunipine
Meh:
* Castle Crashers
* Mount your friends
* Gangbeast
* Hammerwatch
* Screencheat
* ibb & obb
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>As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc." As one who is neither "Grey" nor "Bread," you may wish to check your spelling :) But yes, it's kind of sad that this is the way things are now :(
Hmph. Sourdough life forever!
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Ah, "Grey beard". The term Microsoft used to separate the old from the young at a conference when they first introduced the .NET framework. Classic "old bad, good new" sales. As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc." Yes I remember. Because it was yesterday just before I came to your conference! I still went home and started learning what the hell XML was though. =(
>As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc." As one who is neither "Grey" nor "Bread," you may wish to check your spelling :) But yes, it's kind of sad that this is the way things are now :(
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"Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language." For front-end work maybe, lower down the stack, five years might not be enough to handle the more important things like the corporate RDBMS. A few grey hairs to oversee the youngsters is quite the norm the closer you get to the real value and money of organisations.
Also embedded software, aerospace software, medical devices. Those job listings always ask for at least 5 years of experience, or 10 - and that's not for a senior position at all.
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Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language. It's the hunger games. Medicine, finance, law, accounting...rightly or wrongly respect decades of experience. Tech is Logan's Run. Plan accordingly.
Here we go again, getting confused between SFO/Startup Bro culture and the majority of the productive software industry.
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And this is why software today is in such a sad state. Managers think it would be great to have an army of young engineers who don't question and just do what they're told. But any leader surrounded by sycophants will eventually fail. Management often doesn't realize that they really need the senior engineer who has the experience and confidence to say "NO". Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the proje…
its possible to be experienced and not say no you know? the opposite is also true... the trick really is not saying yes or no, but understanding what your boss really wants, and offering a realistic way forward to achieve that.