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Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

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Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#291

Post by isomorphic »

tomerbd wrote: post #113
isomorphic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm over 40 and I've always worked as a consultant. Until recently I was the sole developer on a site doing eight figures in revenue (now I'm team lead). Without being arrogant here, if my skills match but someone doesn't want my level of experience, it's not a good sign for the someone. On the flip side, I would love to throw out all of the languages and frameworks I've been using for the past few years and learn en…

i'm still trying to figure out whether to learn ruby on rails or play2 scala for web development, what do you suggest?

Write a trivial app in both. Use your own judgment to determine the best tool for the job. It is entirely possible that the best tool will be neither of these!

The website in question is written in Ruby on Rails. Since v1.0 (and Ruby 1.8). And it is now on current Rails (and Ruby!). Rails is a moving target, to put it mildly.

If I had to render an opinion, I'd say I love Ruby. Rails I tolerate. Some parts of Rails are great; others are tedious. By its own admission, Rails is opinionated software. You may or may not share its opinions.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#292

Post by marktangotango »

SiVal wrote: post #277
rapind wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. Don't be a dick is a pretty good strategy. However, I didn't get the impression that was his intent though: "I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan" .

Right. I was neither being "frank" nor intentionally laughing at her plan. She was smiling, and I thought she was kidding. I was smiling, and she apparently thought I was approving. Suddenly, we both realized we were wrong. Oops. At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinato…

Holy shit dude, living this now. The pain in terms of support and phantom, impossible to reproduce errors will go on for years.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#293

Post by cookiecaper »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #222
cookiecaper wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about engineers is that they have very little tolerance for these destructive social shenanigans. Courtesy and politeness are one thing, but ignoring such a flagrantly flawed plan goes beyond courtesy and into professional negligence. When empirical thought is your bread and butter, as it is in the case of software developers, it's hard to see why you should have to acquiesce to the VP's ego. If…

YMMV, but what one perceives as 'unreasonable political games' is highly personality-dependent. Most people have some set of behaviors that they find appropriate in some situations but not in others. For instance, wearing sweatpants to a wedding is generally frowned upon, for reasons that have little to do with their ability to maintain the body at a reasonable operating temperature. You can wear them anyway, but the…

This is not anywhere near as socially tone-deaf as "wearing sweatpants to a wedding" -- it's more like showing up in a tux when everyone else caught the note on the invite "ironic dress only, please wear trash". The situation the parent described was the presentation of a plan of complete absurdity, which he advised against after realizing it was serious.

I agree with you that developers would be well-served by making a stronger effort to play along with the superficial niceties of corporate politics, but like I said, this transcends that and gets into a professional duty to advise against. If the workplace is so corrupt that reasonable opposition to a blatantly silly implementation plan can only result in the correct subordinate getting shuffled around and possibly fired, it's a liability for professionals to continue employment there.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#294

Post by marktangotango »

pjungwir wrote: post #230
ownagefool wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with hiring grey beards, as you put it, is that a lot of them aren't amazing, but due to years, they have an authorative attitude and expect to be paid more than your 20 something devs. If it's my money, I'd hire the 20 year old with gaping holes in their knowledge who are willing and eager to learn over the 40s something dev who thinks their way is better because they're 10 years my senior. I have a…

Something that really frustrates me is people who are more expert than me but can't justify their pronouncements. I had a high school friend who I'm sure was smarter than me claim, "No one does object oriented programming the right way [except him]," but when pressed would just deliberately play games and mystify. Most DBAs I've worked with had their preferred way of doing things, but were incapable of answering Why?…

This is a great point. I try to get people to argue stuff on technical merits, and it's surprisingly hard to do. An example I work with now is the guy who bad mouths sql, non stop, and also promotes nosql non stop. He can't compare and contrast the two, even in general terms. Makes it impossible to have a discussion with him.

I try to be conginizant of where my biases are, and be able to support my assertions on technical grouds. When you do tht though, you often times see there are indeed many valid ways to do things.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#295

Post by beachstartup »

sukilot wrote: post #286
beachstartup wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as you allude to in your final paragraph, the unfortunate reality is that unless you're specifically assigned the task (in this case, the VP was), it's not your role to dictate the plan or criticize it to the level you did. at most, you can make your observations known once. this sort of thing very rarely ends in termination or quitting, but usually a sort of political/social alienation which you describe. in reality…

Successful technology firms are not run the way you describe.

HAHA, what? yes they are. what you're saying is that the at successful companies, individual contributors never get upset at the direction/architecture/decisions the executives and project managers choose - okay buddy.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#296

Post by ktran03 »

fieryeagle wrote: post #290
ktran03 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This varies with where you live. In Canada, a programmer is certainly not an engineer. And for Canadians going for a TN visa to work in the US, programmers are not allowed. Usually they try to slip in as 'Systems analysts' or craft the job/acceptance letter to fit under an engineering discipline. Software Engineers are engineers in Canada. A self taught programmer doing css/html is not an engineer. I'd simply qualify…

Not sure if one should favour 4 years in theory or 4 years in relevant work, for a programming position. For research, yes absolutely as it is straight carryover.

That's an employers decision, my post was not meant to comment on how well someone can program, given their qualifications. Best programmer I know does not have an engineering degree.

Not sure why I got down voted. A quick google search will reveal my comment is factual. At least in Canada where I'm from.

https://archive.org/stream/TNVisaForSystemsAnalystsVsProgram...

"Many people do not realise that computer programmers do not qualify under the TN Visa"

http://peo.on.ca/index.php/ci_id/2057/la_id/1.htm

"meet PEO's stipulated academic requirements for licensure (hold an undergraduate engineering degree from a Canadian Engineering Accreditation board (CEAB)-accredited program, or possess equivalent qualifications), and, if required, successfully complete any technical exams."

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#297

Post by TheCoelacanth »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #205
flexie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering is certainly not a proletariat. Engineers make more money than most professions and have more interesting jobs as well as lots of respect from other professions (I am not an engineer and I can tell you lots of people admire engineers). Also, many professions experience "pay squash". It's a myth that most managers make much more than programmers and that they "just" organize your time. Let's have a little…

not when compared to all other profession that require a degree, constant lerning and are higly specialized (each enginering branch is not interchangeable, as well as within the same branch specializing in one area reduces your employment prospects in others) also, the majority of managers are not the one that are in charge, taking decisions, managing risks and settings directions; middle managers types are way more…

What professions would those be? Law and medicine are probably the two most people are thinking of.

Law does pay more for very successful people, but at the median it actually pays less.

Doctors do get paid more, but they also spend a much longer time in training. The amount of time that most engineers spend in training is more in line with the amount of time that PAs spend in training.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#298

Post by [deleted] »

brianwawok wrote: post #259
scottwhudson wrote: post #179

Working in the Austin startup scene, I definitely get a sense that this is an issue amongst younger companies. However, I look at my father who's now with a massive merchant software company and there's not a single person in his division under the age of 40 (a lot of these guys are maintaining legacy mainframes, etc.) About a year ago, the company realized that they're SOL with a n aging employee base and no one com…

I had to learn a tiny tiny bit of COBOL to help transition some mainframe code from COBOL -> Java. If you are just reading it to gut the program, not a huge deal. You can play with the inputs and outputs and verify your work. Now having to learn COBOL to maintain it? That seems not fun. A simple change can take days...

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Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#299

Post by bad_user »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #262
bad_user wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with Ruby on Rails in the past and with Play2 and Scala currently, I think I can answer that. For your regular web app, both frameworks are mostly the same, both are boring - Rails is more productive for very common tasks, but Play2 is safer because of the underlying language (well, if you pick Scala, otherwise Java just stays in your way). Things get more interesting in Play2 when scalability or latenc…

In all honesty, I'd recommend the use of Erlang alongside a framework like Chicago Boss, N2O or Nitrogen over Play if you want the actor model concurrency, default asynchronicity and WebSocket support. It simply supports these ideas in a way that Scala cannot compete with, alongside its concurrent error handling, the OTP framework, location transparent distributed nodes out of the box, binary pattern matching and so…

The actor model for concurrency is rather poor depending on use-case. I prefer to mix and match approaches. I mean, modeling concurrent state machines, with bi-directional asynchronous communication that makes you easily lose sight of how data moves in your architecture, what could possibly go wrong?

And yes, it's a pretty good model for concurrency, however I consider it to be a compromise on the way to finding better approaches. And in the meantime, it just feels wrong to use a language that forces this mentality on you, unless you have specific use-cases for which this model fits perfectly that is.

And also, on the FP side - many people say that Scala is less FP than other languages, like Erlang. That's a rather odd assertion, because my experience has been the opposite. But that's for another discussion.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#300

Post by [deleted] »

SiVal wrote: post #143
chx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually summarize this thusly: "I have already made the mistake you are about to make". It should be obvious the time savings would worth it to "rent" me. And I am months away from my 40th birthday.

It's funny you should say that. A few years ago, at a company whose name everyone here knows I, an old gray-hair, almost lost my full-time job for warning a VP that she was about to make a mistake I'd seen before. I honestly thought she was joking when she told me about the approach she was going to use to deal with a "hard deadline" of four months. I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized…

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