211–220 of 341 posts
Correct me if i'm wrong, but most things great about computers were created by people who are now older than 40.
Can people name a few important technologies that were created by someone younger than 40?
And if you want to have your company bought, who will be buying? People who are older than 40! (except for FB)
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The second group decided at some point that they knew all they needed to know, and they've gotten really rusty and out of date. How do you know this? Have you been in a good position to evaluate the performance of many older devs? If so, how much diversity in languages/environments is in your sample? Most of the negative attention I've gotten from younger devs in work settings has been in the form of constant interru…
When I was younger, I had a co-worker who was quite older than others. I must confess I fell from my chair when I saw him going to his editor menu to perform a copy-paste. He did not know about the most known shortcut ever. But I kept that for myself despite the itch to insist on telling him to use the damn shortcut instead of going to the menu each time. After all, he was as productive as the younger ones as far as…
Are you sure? I had a coworker who was a fellow Smalltalk consultant. At the time he was just out of college and in his 20's, but he deliberately didn't use any OS keyboard shortcuts. Our company's development environments ran transparently cross platform on eight different OS, so to keep himself from stumbling when out in the field, he only used the cross platform UI commands.
So perhaps your coworker didn't want to spend extra effort on Ctrl-C Ctrl-V because he wanted to preserve muscle memory for another system? (OS X?) Did he normally work in Emacs? Or maybe he's just jaded.
But I kept that for myself despite the itch to insist on telling him to use the damn shortcut instead of going to the menu each time. After all, he was as productive as the younger ones as far as quantity was concerned, and more productive as far as quality was concerned.
Good on you! It's the output that matters. And if one can't have a modicum of patience while collaborating/pair programming, then that's a sure sign of an opportunity to learn something valuable and powerful.
touch typing evangelist maniacs. They probably allot a specific budget for spare backspace keys. In my experience, that's the key they use the most.
I'm constantly amazed at the degree to which young people in the Bay Area pay attention to preference signalling. It's like they think it's some sort of divine oracle or moral imperative in and of itself!
I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 years old and get a job if you can do work. Maybe you can't get a job at fart.IO building an API for some craft beer BS but at many mid to large companies 40 is still an average. The last 4-5 companies I've been at value bullet points over anything else (for wha…
Is the potshot on jQuery and PHP really necessary? I know enough people where I live making six figures (low COL city) with PHP, SQL and jQuery that I don't think they're ready to sunset.
I didn't even know PHP before I started on this journey at the beginning of the year. I was trying to peddle my (admittedly meager) Python skills but everyone who had money to pay wanted boring PHP devs to maintain and build on 7-10 year old systems, so I brushed up and landed a few nice stable gigs. Will easily clear 6 figures within the next month or so for the year.
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This unfortunate obsession with new and shiny in the Valley is why we have to learn lessons like the benefits of relational databases over and over. Most of the new stuff isn't improved, it is simply different.
Relational dbs sure, but there are legitimate scale reasons to use a distributed key value store (for instance). There is no reason to be stuck with PHP today though. It's a very backward language when you compare to something with a modern type system/features (e.g. Go, Rust, Clojure, Java 8+, Scala...). Devs need to have a passion for learning technology. Not because it's the shiny new thing but because the new tec…
Seems rather silly to discriminate against 4x people. Correct me if i'm wrong, but most things great about computers were created by people who are now older than 40. Can people name a few important technologies that were created by someone younger than 40? And if you want to have your company bought, who will be buying? People who are older than 40! (except for FB)
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Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer. Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.
Not just Portland, the entire American craft beer scene is infected with shitty, indistinguishable IPA's that all taste like a mountain of hops.
Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.
Indeed! The primary reason for the median age in Google and Facebook being so low is that the median age for programmers is low [1]. The reason for this low median age? There are more young programmers than old because it's an expanding field! Though I must admit that the evidence points to current significant age biases in the hiring of these companies. The most successful older software developers I've come across…
Er... you're quoting Stack Overflow study which only tells about the median age of people who voluntarily went to Stack Overflow website to answer Stack Overflow study, after seeing the link on Stack Overflow / HN / Reddit.
That is hardly representative of anything. One hint: 30% people who responded are under 24 years old, i.e. most of them have not yet completed their studies and started working.
I come from a family with a few generations of engineers of all types. Mechanical/chemical/electrical engineers have a similar problem that 30 years experience isn't much more useful than 10, wages tend to top out early and you're vulnerable to being laid off and never hired again in your 40s/50s. One advantage over software is that the skills change perhaps less frequently but that is offset by lower overall demand.…
This. Do this and one of the other strategies. Just save some freaking money. I know far to many people who are up-to-their-eyes in debt and have almost no savings.
Some 'Official' Stats Source: http://www.bls.gov/cps/demographics.htm I would put some relevant comment on the meaning of these figures but I have to put my kids to bed, sort out their school packed lunch, get scolded by my wife - all before I work on my side projects. I'll leave it to the youngsters.
42.1 Computer systems analysts
44.7 Information security analysts
43.1 Computer programmers
39.7 Software developers, applications and systems software
35.9 Web developers
40.5 Computer support specialists
47.0 Database administrators
41.2 Network and computer systems administrators
41.6 Computer network architects
41.2 Computer occupations, all other
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Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer. Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.
On that note, why are there so many new IPAs in PNW? I like IPAs, but I doubt most people want them.