Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#81

Post by bmj » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:29 PM UTC

Mouse47 wrote: post #74

ruffel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…

Yup. I've seen 55+ year old programmers write what was essentially a message queue persisted in a database table, processed by a cron job. We frequently had problems with duplicate processing of messages, due to multiple cron jobs running at once. I've personally argued against a key-value store schema in SQL Server and was in favor of a flat-table design. In our case, there were records of different 'types', and eac…

I work in an organization that is relatively balanced as far as age goes (I'm 45). The most senior-level engineers tend to be older than me, though there are a few younger guys (still over 30). Perhaps I'm just fortunate, but here's what I've observed:

We tend to be fairly agile with regard to new technologies, and much of that is driven by the architects. A few of the young folks will recommend bleeding edge platforms/libraries/techniques. Some of this stuff has been accepted, some of it hasn't. It is almost always filtered through the lens of experience ("what happened when we tried to introduce x? ").

Experience counts, primarily because one group has been burned in the past by accepting recommendations from just-out-of-college engineers. That's not to say the younger devs don't know anything, but they have precious little experience shipping actual product.

(We work in the medical domain, so "move fast and break things" doesn't work so well in a highly-regulated industry).

On the other hand, our senior build engineer is more, uh, established in his ways, and we are currently stuck on an antiquated version control system. This particular engineer also wields quite a bit of influence to the larger company, so his way tends to be the way we go (unfortunately).

At the end of the day, I think you find stuck-in-their-old-way folks in an industry. This is not at all unique to software engineering.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#82

Post by thehardsphere » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:30 PM UTC

grive wrote: post #16

thehardsphere wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can gain experience without necessarily becoming old at the same time. They're correlated, but not causal.

Experience takes time. More or less, depending on several factors (willingness to learn and improve, complexity of the subject, ...). But by definition, if you gain experience, you just got older than before. You cannot magically learn everything out of sheer willpower. Additionally, a few things are impossible to learn without time: the "Judgement" section in the article. You can certainly theoretically understand t…

Ok, let me be more explicit.

You are absolutely correct that experience takes time and that the type of experience that the author speaks of comes from writing something and supporting it.

What I am saying, is that you can choose to write different types of things and support them, without having to become 40+ years old. Not out of "sheer willpower" either; you just have to choose to write different types of things and support them. Yes, you will be older than you were before you started. But... to get that experience you do not need to reach age 40.

If anything, simply getting older is not a guarantee that you will get that experience. Suppose you only program CRUD apps for 20 years with the exact same stack every time. There's only so many times you can write the same sort of app over and over again before you get diminishing returns on that kind of experience. The author knows this implicitly, but assumes from his own experience that other 40+ year old programmers will have as wide a range of experience as he does.

That's really the specific premise of his that I'm questioning: that being an old programmer automatically means you have a wide range of useful experience that makes you better.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#83

Post by pc86 » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:30 PM UTC

RickJWagner wrote: post #10

I like it. Of course, I'm an older programmer. But still.

"I am in favor of discrimination as long as I am not the one discriminated against."

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#84

Post by pc86 » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:31 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #23

eganist wrote: post #18

If an attorney were building an age discrimination case against a person (or entity, per jacquesm below) involved in the rejection of a younger candidate, posts like this are among the evidence I suspect would be used to point to a discriminatory mindset. That said, I'm not a lawyer. If someone were to be making hiring decisions, posts like this discovered during the course of casual googling would oblige the person…

(1) You don't make legal cases against people involved in a hiring rejection, you make a case against a company. (2) If you are making hiring decisions the appearance of random blog posts should not and will not give you any legal basis not to hire. Legality is encoded in the law, not in blogposts, especially not in blogposts by random passers by. If you were using this as a reason not to hire the person writing the…

(3) It is 100% legal to not hire someone under the age of 40 based on their age.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#85

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:32 PM UTC

timwaagh wrote: post #76

js8 wrote: post #50

I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40. If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody…

programmers actually need to think sometimes. the jobs mentioned are more routine and rely on soft skills and experience a lot. I do not mean any disrespect by that. mathematicians are also best when they are young, but unlike programmers work in academia and get to teach until retirement, whereas programmers get replaced.

Doctors don't need to think? Come on, man.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#86

Post by thehardsphere » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:32 PM UTC

liveoneggs wrote: post #31

thehardsphere wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can gain experience without necessarily becoming old at the same time. They're correlated, but not causal.

I enjoy your attempt to use "it's not the years it's the mileage" but your assertion that there is some way to gain "experience" without "time" doesn't make a lot of sense.

I did not say you gain gain experience without time; I said you can gain experience without becoming old. That is, you can gain the kind of experience the author discusses before reaching age 40.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#87

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:36 PM UTC

timwaagh wrote: post #76

js8 wrote: post #50

I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40. If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody…

programmers actually need to think sometimes. the jobs mentioned are more routine and rely on soft skills and experience a lot. I do not mean any disrespect by that. mathematicians are also best when they are young, but unlike programmers work in academia and get to teach until retirement, whereas programmers get replaced.

I'd hope that my doctor "need[s] to think sometimes". Anything less while holding a scalpel in anticipation of cutting me open is downright terrifying.

Same goes, ideally, for politicians and lawyers and engineers.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#88

Post by nickrio » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:37 PM UTC

kageneko wrote: post #51

ruffel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…

In my experience, growing older, I've found both of these generalizations to be true in myself. There are plenty of times that I've watched junior developers make literally the exact same mistakes I made 10 years ago. At the same time, I've learned that technology has continued to move on and things that were wrong 10 years ago may not be wrong today. I remember when I started out that I'd scour every line of code fo…

Problem is a lots of young people may not seeing old people and old knowledge the same way like old people do.

They may think the old programmer are leak of passion, just there to do their part of job, not creating things and "Change the world" like they do.

For example when you tell them to parse HTTP header with a 256 buffer, they may argue why not give me 4K buffer so they can done it more easily, "It's fine to use 4K for that, just install more memory".

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#89

Post by drewg123 » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:38 PM UTC

autokad wrote: post #8

How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.

Better and worse.

Worse in that we're 25 years removed from Algorithms classes.

Better in that we're used to explaining ideas to colleagues and management, and generally much better at expressing ourselves than we were when we first graduated from college.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#90

Post by tonecluster » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 1:39 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #44

ruffel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…

"that's not how I'm used to doing it" To be fair - I'm not sure how that is age related. e.g. I've had very strong reactions from some inexperienced developers who literally only had knowledge of one way of doing things to the possibility that another option might be possible and better.

I hear this much more often from the less-experienced programmers than I do from the seasoned, experienced ones. Once in a while, and usually in a very large shop, I hear it from an experienced veteran. However, usually (not always, but usually) from one who's had 1 year of experience 20 times rather than 20 years of experience.