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

improvingsoftware.com

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

#321

Post by miskin »

bsder wrote: post #241
scarface74 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But as the article said, there is a diminishing amount of value after every year of true experience after a number of years. I would say around 10. I definitely don’t believe in the “10x Engineer” (individual contributor) - yes they do exist but are so rare they aren’t worth talking about. I do believe in being a force multiplier as a team lead/mentor.

> But as the article said, there is a diminishing amount of value after every year of true experience after a number of years. I would say around 10. I don't buy it. 10 years is about when you start moving into the actual expert category. Note I said start . At 35, I finally had real, full control over multiple languages, could pick up CLR and understand and implement any algorithm in it, finally understood exactly w…

Simplicity is definitely a virtue. When I maintain large codebase of 10+ year project, it is easy to spot where someone tried to be very clever, and it is rarely benefit for codebase maintainability and extendability in the long term. Things rarely get reused that much to take advantage of overcomplicated abstract solution. Most of the times developers do not predict future business requirements correctly and simple solution would be the better one.

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

#322

Post by bing111 »

I moved from Bay Area to LA about 7 years ago. In Bay Area, they treated software engineers like a king but here in LA, I worked at 3 companies so far and engineers aren't treated that well. LA is still very much old fashioned corporate style(unless you work for a Bay Area company who has an office in LA or somewhere like Snap). Managers get the respect and micromanage engineers. One engineering manager in a big entertainment company in LA told me once - "oh engineers are just commodities." I sometimes miss the Bay Area vibe of engineers being treated like celebrities.

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

#323

Post by lioeters »

pjungwir wrote: post #214

I'm 42 and still coding. I have a lot of rambly thoughts. . . . I love programming and don't want to go into management, but it becomes really hard to keep upping your salary after the first 5-8 years or so. (And isn't it silly how many job ads for "senior engineers" ask for 3-5 years of experience?) I could join a FAANG but I don't really want to. You do keep getting better, even when you keep changing the tech. It…

As someone in a similar age group and position, I enjoyed your rambly thoughts. It gives me the warm fuzzies to hear about your hard work, satisfaction and gratitude.

I'm right there with you in feeling grateful to be part of a generous and intelligent community. I feel lucky to be able to make a living doing what I love to do, and even though the business can be tough, it's a joy with so many bright colleagues around the world.

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

#324

Post by shados »

Software engineering is a field that evolves and you need to stay up to date. It's far from the only field like that.

When you get out of school (or whatever path you took), you are knowledgeable about the current state of things. If you're an entry level engineer, chances are you'll have people teaching you what you don't know, mentoring you, and generally expect you to learn with them. Of course, as high as software salaries are these days, your expectations then are still lower than the older folks. Chances are you have less things to pay for outside of student loans in the US.

As you get older, you can do 2 things: you can passively coast as long as you can, or you can actively keep yourself up to date. If you choose the later, your knowledge stays current and you keep adding experience, making you more and more valuable. Short of health issues getting in the way, that will never stop. You just keep getting better.

If you passively coast though, what you know becomes less and less relevant. For the first couple of years, experience gain >> the part of your knowledge that is outdated, so you still go upward. There's a limit to that. That 35-40 yo line, assuming you started in your early to mid 20s, sound about right for when you lost more than you gained. And thus you're no longer worth the price of admission you're likely expecting to pay for your kids/mortgage/401k/whatever. And that's when things get rough.

But if you play your cards right? There's no problem.

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

#325

Post by c0vfefe »

pmiller2 wrote: post #122
spraak wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> grinding away at a FANG I've started to propose we s/FANG/Big N/g "FANG" leaves off other obvious big companies, e.g. Uber, and it wouldn't scale to keep trying to add them to the acronym. Here N is used like when one talks about a list "N items long"

Uber and Lyft don’t belong on any “Big N” list until they show a profit rather than pissing away billions a year.

How much profit does Amazon show?

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

#326

Post by pmiller2 »

c0vfefe wrote: post #325
pmiller2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber and Lyft don’t belong on any “Big N” list until they show a profit rather than pissing away billions a year.

How much profit does Amazon show?

Amazon has demonstrated its ability to show a profit. Uber and Lyft have not.

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

#327

Post by svachalek »

unoti wrote: post #298
asdfman123 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you hear all these horror stories about how developers have a "shelf life." In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. Look at any hobby -- say, guitar playing. The difference between someone who's been doing it for 4 years and someone who's been doing it 20 years is ridiculous. They're so much better. I feel…

> In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. While this is true for you, there is a lot of selection bias and survivor bias involved in this. For These older developers you need to also consider their comrades they were working with 20 years ago. For every older dev you work with today, there are 10 of their former…

Or they hit the stock lottery jackpot and have retired, or moved into management, or marketing, or started a sandwich shop.

But I do think there's a bit of generational shift that the stereotype of outdated engineers haven't caught up with. When I started out in the mid-90s, anyone more than a little older than me didn't have a CS degree and had come up in a world without source control, continuous integration, automated testing, iterative development processes, open source libraries, etc, etc. So in some ways they were from a different planet than the next generation. Although the tech du jour still changes quickly, programmers in their 40s these days still have a comparatively small gap when it comes to education and development process.

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

#328

Post by icedchai »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #254
twblalock wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 15 years of compound interest in the stock market more than covers the difference in income between a 25 year old and a 40 year old. The 25 year old has enough time to take risks with money, while the 40 year old needs to be thinking more about preservation of capital.

I don't think so. The 25-year-old needs the money starting in 20 years; so does the 40-year-old. The 25-year-old needs the money to last 45 years after retirement; the 40-year-old needs it to last 30 years. Those aren't significantly different time horizons. The 40-year-old can therefore invest with a very similar risk profile, and get very similar returns.

The difference is the 40 year may not want to work for 15+ years to build up his nest egg. The guy who started in his 20's can basically coast...

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

#329

Post by UncleMeat »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #227
C4stor wrote: post #46

I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The older guys, they seem like they had the time to correctly learn the unix network tools, the jvm debugging ones, the memory inspection ones. I've known older devs for which I have the utmost respect because I felt like they can just debug t…

The javascript ecosystem however... The entire stack literally (for the actual meaning of literally) change completely every year. Frameworks, language, package manager, libraries, etc.

Sure. But learning a new framework is like 100th on the list of hard parts of being an engineer. Its new incantations but ultimately the loop of solving business problems with automation is precisely the same.

100% of my team had basically zero C++ experience before joining. Our application is developed entirely in C++. I didn't care one bit because learning the programming idioms is so trivial compared to the actually hard stuff.

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

#330

Post by C4stor »

irq11 wrote: post #232
C4stor wrote: post #46

I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The older guys, they seem like they had the time to correctly learn the unix network tools, the jvm debugging ones, the memory inspection ones. I've known older devs for which I have the utmost respect because I felt like they can just debug t…

It’s practically a trope that every time this subject comes up, the top-rated comment is a skeptical response...from a junior developer. As someone who actually has worked as a programmer on the far side of 40, let me assure you that yes, older programmers have value. Your perceptions are not wrong. But that said, the article is right . The people who do the hiring and firing do not care about what you care about. As…

I litterally wrote that I don't how management values what I value.

I also never wrote that the article is wrong, I wrote that I didn't find it convincing.

I'm simply observing that after more than ten years developing and learning the craft, I still find myself not able to correctly know the old tools, and instead I merely have an idea of some that exist, and I'm sometimes able to google the correct one.

As so, I'm stating that when I see a graybeard with actual knowledge of fundamentals that I still totally lack, well, I respect that, and I _hope_ that he's not unemployable because if it is the case, I fear that our industry is doomed to produced always more buggy software due to a lack of basic understanding.

And I think than faced with no evidence from the article or you, it's well within my rights to be skeptical.

So, thank you for the unwarranted condescendance.

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