Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.
Does anyone with 20 years experience refer to themselves as a "full-stack developer?"
Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
221–230 of 270 posts
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a rule. If I trust the PM, I always give my best estimation and a level of confidence on this estimation with the risks. Like: - I think it will take a week, but this part looks a bit complex, so we may have delays. - Or, I did something similar last month, so I am quite sure that will take 3 days. A good PM will know how to deal with this information and what to expect. If I don't trust the PM, I just add mas…
As a PM, of course, I know this padding is happening and generally will add my own: You know in your mind it will take you 3 days You give me, your PM, an estimate of 2 weeks I report up the chain that it will take a month When it's all said and done, you end up getting it done in a month by the skin of your teeth :-)
But my point is that if there is a relation of trust between the PM and the developers, padding is unnecessary.
I had PMs to who I could give optimistic estimations and risks. That way, the PM could plan the different scenarios (like extra features in case we had spare time).
Other PMs, the ones who converted estimations into deadlines, got lots of padding. And the problem of adding padding is that it is time lost, because a developer who adds padding cannot tell that they finished earlier.
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#223"The median U.S. worker is 42. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?"
I think most of this is due to the simple fact that software development has been a steadily growing profession for decades. Thus, the "population pyramid" of software engineers will very much be a pyramid and older developers will be proportionally scarce. If you want to make meaningful predictions about your personal likelihood of staying in software development beyond a certain age, you'd need to slice the numbers differently.
I believe that once the number of software engineers stabilizes, the age distribution will become more similar to other fields. Some will leave the field during their career due to changes of interest or due to life throwing them curveballs. But a lot will stay.
I'm 43, BTW. Still find software development and tech enjoyable.
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#224What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" Would anyone think it odd for a 60-year-old physician to still be doctoring, or a 60-year-old lawyer to still practice law. Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft. Corporate culture embraces the notion of management as a profession. I think programming would benefit greatly from more of a tradecraft model, where leaders…
> What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?"
What's up is the rampant ageism in the industry - the perception that you are washed up as a "dinosaur" developer after a certain age, maybe 40 or so, and belong in management.
We "dinosaurs" - we happy few - are living evidence to the contrary.
-- 58 year old broad-spectrum software guy, hard at work and loving it
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone with 20 years experience refer to themselves as a "full-stack developer?"
By default, most programmers from two decades ago ARE full stack developers. Back then, there was no separation of front end, back end or database - it was all melded into one, so if I wanted to write an app, I would have to learn the language, figure out how to display the data and collect user input from the screen, write the data tables and the code to update it etc. etc. There was no question of learning SQL or r…
Yes! Thank you. I never know what to call myself. I just signed a comment as "broad-spectrum software developer", but your description is more accurate.
We catch the things that fall between the cracks; we are the glue that binds together the things that fall apart; we are the toolmakers, the automaters, the pinch-hitter sysadmins; we are problem solvers, the ones that do whatever it takes - and if we don't know how, we learn.
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, no, that's just today speak for "systems developer". Really, someone who can dev/debug run-times for any languages, write C10K networking code, write good Haskell code, do wonders with average SQL RDBMSes, suffer through JS, and put together a complete solution. I actually like the term "full stack developer". I take it to mean: can handle anything from assembly to HLL and everything in between.
I would argue that "systems developer" is the opposite of "full stack" Your average full attack dev probably doesn't even know what assembler is.
"Full attack dev?"
I like that - may I use it?
-- 58 year old full-attack dev
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
no, it only seems that way because the powerful silicon valley and finance giants are the only ones with access to the top-tier young talent. the rest of the young people out there are inexperienced and not that smart, and definitely aren't worth a six figure salary. so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.
You also can't get away with demanding the same work conditions or work/life balance from an older person than you can from a 21 year old CS graduate who's very eager to impress and has little other commitments to attend to. I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. You build it, you support it so keep your phone an…
> I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week.
Yes, because we've fallen for that bullshit before, killed ourselves to meet the deadline, and found that the asshole manager made it artificially short to "motivate" us, and the other teams aren't even finished yet :)
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#22845. Still coding, probably until I die. Light years ahead of younger developers in the following: * Writing less code * Writing maintainable code * Re-using existing code (requires reading existing code) * Know how APIs should be written * Knowing how to properly map associations * Know when or when not to use another library * Knowing when to tell a product manager to go back and do some more product managing * Know…
> Saying "I don't know" when asked "How long will it take" or "When will it be done" ~5 years experience speaking: How do you do this? I have a very good boss and he knows things, objectively, like "estimates are very squishy," and "developers suck at estimating time" etc. But he still demands time estimates to give clients. Our clients are often agencies, and they get it as well. I do estimates like "10-40 hours, de…
> How do you do this?
I draw them the Cone of Uncertainty (http://www.construx.com/Thought_Leadership/Books/The_Cone_of...).
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#229I'm 52, started writing code professionally in 1985. Started my career on 68K assembler. In the 90's I was a Windows SDK developer (then COM/ATL, etc.), In 1999 started a company but chose Linux and embraced FOSS and built a company on a Lamp stack (sold it in 2014). The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every mo…
> The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every month.
I am lucky enough to work in an environment where we work with many technologies in a rapidly-evolving area, and most of us have multiple responsibilities, so I can say without fear of hyperbole that, on average, I learn something new every day, be it how to find the signing cert needed to verify an ADFS OAuth2 JWT, or configure Gitlab EE correctly to authenticate with an LDAP server. I think I would simply croak if I had to do a conventional job.
-- 58 year old attack dev
Re: Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
#230creak. 69 here, still employed and coding etc, started in 1967, spent too many years having to make it up as I went along to specialize. If anything that specialty might be embedded systems, but not only. I would definitely guess my demographic is small. I find SO sometimes useful where my Google-fu fails me, but every so often I also get to ask the developer of the language/whatever directly instead. We're all about that age now, and it's a small and shrinking community.