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Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

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Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#61

Post by TimGebhardt »

pirateking wrote: post #50
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #49

I love programming and still consider myself a programmer first, although I do a lot of other things too. If I wanted to rag on programming, I'd point out how many dysfunctional programming workplaces we have, or how our tools are always 100 times more complex than they need to be, or how setting up and managing the programming environment can take the joy right out of actually doing the work. (I could go on at lengt…

Creating your own reality is at odds with correctness.

Great, now I've got the Mythbusters intro running in my head like an earworm... I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#62

Post by gexla »

Taken to extremes - if it's not worth doing at 20 then it's not worth doing at 50. If you feel that you don't want to be doing this at 50 then you should probably get out as soon as possible.

He also mentions something to the effect of not being able to take the time to completely understand everything. But the problem is, it doesn't matter if you are being paid or not. Your lifetime will always be a constraint. You will never completely understand everything you are working with.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#63

Post by colomon »

lazyjones wrote: post #54

For much of this frustration I blame the modern practice of letting some committee design a protocol or other standards and then force that down the throats of programmers. This leads to bloated designs and deficient implementations and documentation and last, but not least, far too many revisions and alternatives. Back in the day, protocols (tools, languages, ...) were designed by people who thought very hard about…

I don't know squat about your specific examples, but I couldn't agree more with the general principle. In my sub-field, the obvious example is the ISO-designed STEP file format, which several times longer than the older IGES standard (exact count is hard to get because the STEP standard is split up into dozens of books, not all necessarily relevant) yet is drastically less specific about how you actually put together a meaningful file.

For instance, the STEP AP203 standards document is 500+ pages long. (That's the old edition, I don't have a printed copy of the second edition handy.) But those pages don't tell you how to use the hundreds of classes they define to actually create a meaningful file. For that you need the supplemental "recommended practices" document (http://www.steptools.com/support/stdev_docs/express/ap203/re...), which has been marked "preliminary" for the last 14 years and is itself not particularly clear. (On the bright side, at least it's free!)

Of course, that only applies to one of the many different STEP application protocols, and while I did find a reference to an AP214 (which I also need to support) recommended practices document, the link to it was dead.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#66

Post by woodhull »

kamaal wrote: post #43
gonzo wrote: post #20

I am 50. I had a large portion of the 'middle' of my career in management, including a couple CTO/VP Eng positions, with the traditional increasing stress. So I moved to Hawaii for nearly a decade, got rid of the stress, rediscovered programming, and I'm happy again.

I think the reason you are even able(read afford) to move to Hawaii is because you went through a couple of CTO/VP Eng positions, with traditional increasing stress.

Any American citizen can move to Hawaii anytime they like. It's not terribly hard to do, especially with a high demand skill that lets you find work anywhere, globally, like being a software engineer.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#67

Post by lifeisstillgood »

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #45
danso wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from any other job? Listen even to people in traditionally creative/uplifting jobs...including artists and teachers. It's depressing to hear how much of their time is struggling with data entry/Excel/why-wont-the-font-stay-the-same-size issues...time (and energy and angst) that is probably substantial over their career

Interesting. I remember an industry teacher once saying to me that "You'll probably never put '10 years experience in Technology X' on a CV." because by the time it's been around for that long it will be pretty much obsolete. The fundamentals of computer science won't change (big-O, synchronised distributed systems, logic etc.) so I suppose it will just come down to re-learning the modern day tech. But that's the sam…

I think the skillset as we get older is knowing when to duck.

It might be called wisdom, mentoring, what have you but basically, having been in situation X before, you can give sensible advice to someone just entering situation X.

Monetising that is generally harder

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#68

Post by Surio »

Remember the mantra - "location, location..", and also context. In other words, where you are working (geolocation of company, and therefore the strategic operations concentrated in that place, company size, technology, etc.), what you do on a daily basis, whether you are doing things like "skimming great oceans of APIs, but the market will have moved" day in and day out. (There's a lot of gems in that article, BTW)

Add to my above para, this other gem of an observation:

If you're fresh out of school, there are free Starbucks lattes down the hall, and all your friends are still at the office at 2 AM, too...well, that works. But then you have to do it again. And again. It's always a last second skid at 120 miles per hour with brakes smoking and tires shredding that makes all the difference between success and failure, but you pulled off another miracle and survived to do it again.

That article really resonated with me. And, no I can't see myself doing it at 50 :-)

EDIT: One more thing to add with regards to context of operations, rewards are also skewed in favour of management rather than "engineers", so at some point mortgage, loans, education and medical expenses will overshadow 'fun'.

Re: Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

#70

Post by cmdkeen »

6ren wrote: post #44

> ... a problem domain you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand. One resolution is to create products that address problems. Then, you can justify time in understanding and improving, because it's amortised over many users. Of course there's still pressures, and technology still moves, but it's not cut and paste and pray.

Or go and work in that industry. I work in finance and the office has plenty of older programmers who have been trained in the theory of what they're working on.

Being a good software engineer still puts you in a large group. Being a good software engineer with good domain specific knowledge instantly puts you in a much smaller group.

It can also be much more satisfying work. And an awful lot more secure (depending on the firm) compared to starting out on your own.

Trying to be a rockstar competing on your coding merits alone is going to be damn hard to keep going for 30+ years.

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