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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)

#421

Post by scarface74 »

rapind wrote: post #400
scarface74 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this but sometimes you just need hands on keyboard to push things out fast. Yes I can do a passable job at front end, middleware, databases, and I'm pretty adept at cloud infrastructure and devops. Does that mean I'm as valuable as 5 people? I can only do one of those at the same time.

It depends entirely on how much autonomy and motivation you have. I have to do all of that for my own modest product, but it's only viable because I have complete autonomy to decide what the most efficient approach would be... and I enjoy it. This isn't typically how it plays out when you start a new job for someone else. Which means they won't reap the rewards of your experience until enough trust has been built to…

It’s not about autonomy. I work for a small company where I have a reasonable amount of control of how I implement anything. But, I can only do one thing at a time. At a certain point, you need more people to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time.

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

#422

Post by Silhouette »

andrewnc wrote: post #412
Silhouette wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it doesn't have to be and, until relatively recently, honestly wasn't. Indeed. It's almost as if it's a bad idea to take people working in a field where creativity and careful thought are fundamental and a wide variety of experience with different but related ideas is often helpful and then try to turn them into interchangeable commodities with the whole process dumbed down to the level of the least com…

This comment is so refreshing, could I email you some questions about starting a freelance/consultancy?

That seems relevant to today's subject. Perhaps you would like to post your questions here so others can read and write answers as well?

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

#423

Post by cerberusss »

Franciscouzo wrote: post #376
mr_overalls wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable To be fair, this observation could be massively influenced by survivorship bias - more talented devs tend to be the ones still programming in older age.

To go with the guitar playing analogy, there's plenty of people that have played the guitar for 20 years and always play the same 4 chords.

Indeed. My previous job was very Java-focused but wanted a more senior man on the team. So management hired a developer with 20 years of experience in C and Fortran.

Now in my country, when you hire someone, a probation period of two months is very common. In that period, you can be fired and/or leave without cause.

Unfortunately, he was not able to pick up object-oriented programming in those two months and left before the probation period expired.

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

#424

Post by joelbluminator »

inetknght wrote: post #360
sbov wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, most languages are not sinking ships. Certain uses of them are of course. But even languages this site hates, such as C, C++, C#, and Java have very long lives ahead of them for certain uses. Obviously C++ vs Rails... well, you're going to be out of a job. But if you were using C++ for the sorts of things you would have used Rails in 2009 you were already a decade or so behind the curve.

I doubt it. C++ has come a long way in the past decade and still has a lot of momentum. As for rails? Admittedly I'm in an anti-ruby bubble... but the Ruby developers I do know definitely don't use Rails anymore. Ruby seems to have matured into basically just Chef/Vagrant in my bubble and any Rails apps are being deprecated in favor of the bubble-biased languages.

Rails developer here. It's still quite easy to get a Rails job; maybe not for Google, but easy. There's much less hype but also less competition over jobs (many young developers come with Python/Nodejs backgrounds nowadays, many senior Rubyists left for greener fields).

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

#425

Post by joelbluminator »

scarface74 wrote: post #316
bsder wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 why concurrency was so damn hard and how to mitigate that, and would pass practically every interview with flying colors. I could finally drive my tools with some facility and started to realize gdb was my friend. You may be an expert in multiple languages but…

But some things translate much better than others: Django and Rails aren't that different (I'd also put Laravel in there). So I think the real problem is moving from a senior Django role to a senior Rails role and vice versa, but I see no reason why a 10 years Django developer can't get a mid-level Rails job (other than blatant age discrimination that is).

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

#426

Post by C4stor »

irq11 wrote: post #367
C4stor wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I honestly wasn’t trying to be condescending to you. I even said, right at the very beginning of my comment, that you’re right about many of your observations. My word choice may have been poor in some places, but overall I defend the content. You’re (self-admittedly) missing some of the life and business experience that comes with being an older programmer, and then expressing skepticism about direct advice communic…

Well, what you wrote was :

> It’s practically a trope that every time this subject comes up, the top-rated comment is a skeptical response...from a junior developer.

I looked at the top rated comment for the other times this exact same article was posted on hacker news. For none of those, the top rated comment "is a skeptical response...from a junior developer". Actually, it's more often (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934500, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580) from a self declared senior developer. And none of those top comments really collaborate the article. Talk about confirming one's biases...

But taking into account all the anecdote from senior devs available just on hackernews, there's no consensus emerging whether the article makes sense or not.

So, at this point, I don't really feel the need for a plan B, even if being 40 years old is not really this far away for me. And it seems from the shared stories that whether this is needed or not is really based on personal experience, and is not a generally needed advice. I certainly hope to be in a path where I'm honing my skills well enough to be able to continue beind paid to engineer software after I'm 40.

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

#427

Post by phektus »

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…

> Admittedly, I have no clue if the management realises that ! Well, that's the key thing in many places: it's management that decides whether to hire and how much to offer, not you :)

The first instinct would be to put 'resources' that costs little into a project, and that usually means people with less experience that requires less pay and are easier to drag around. Imagine the difficulty they will be having trying to grok your line of reasoning for respecting and going after these older devs.

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

#428

Post by lifeisstillgood »

daotoad wrote: post #315
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #180

Firstly I am a proponent of the idea of software as a new form of literacy - it is eating the world and as such if you are literate you run rings round the illiterate - no matter what your age. But companies are pyramids - and some roles (like sales) mean their value to the company can be measured on an individual basis. But most roles cannot - and the further away from the customer you are the more it is true As suc…

This is why you need to have Senior and Principal engineering roles. As a programmer or operations engineer you should be able to choose between a management or engineering track for advancement. The managers work as an interface between the management hierarchy and the individual contributors. The top engineers work across teams to steer technical solutions and provide cross team focus and continuity. Your principal…

>> interface between the management hierarchy

>> don't have time

that's your problem right there

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

#429

Post by wpietri »

cutler wrote: post #407
wpietri wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a mistake to confuse JVM languages with Java. But that aside, By "Java is the new COBOL", I'm not saying that Java today is COBOL today. I'm saying it's a dominant language for legacy apps and a lot of "enterprise" coding in shops that already have a heavy Java investment. But relatively few new companies are doing new work in pure Java, so it's definitely headed down the same road. And there are definit…

According to angel.co there are 88 startups in London alone using Java. Whenever I attend London's Silicon Milk Roundabout bi-annual jobs fair the dominant languages are Python and Java. Java's status in the top 3 programming languages worldwide cannot be explained away by its dominant position in legacy enterprise software. What about Android, for example?

I personally have done a startup in Java in 2004, and have written Java code for money as recently as last year. So I feel comfortable saying Java is generally a bad idea for startups.

Java was the core language for Android because it started in the early 2000s, when Java was the new hotness. But it is no longer the primary Android language; that's now officially Kotlin, because the majority of developers had already switched away from Java: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/kotlin-is-now-googles-pref...

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

#430

Post by commandlinefan »

spraak wrote: post #72
commandlinefan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of years ago, the company I worked for abruptly went out of business (like, I came into work on Monday and they said, “we’re closed effectively immediately, go home, we’ll e-mail you severance details”). I sent out about a dozen resumes, got two interviews, flunked the first and got an offer at the second - the whole process took about two weeks and I was no longer unemployed. I was on good terms with one of…

And to be clear, you were a developer and got another development job?

Sorry, should have clarified. Yes, IC here. IC for life.
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