Why Coding At Fifty May Be Nifty 317
theodp writes "Enough with the dadgum naysayers. Google's Vivek Haldar lists some good reasons for why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age). Haldar's list would probably get a thumbs-up from billionaire SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, who had this to say about coding when interviewed at age 56: 'I would be happy if I just stayed in my office and programmed all day, to tell you the truth. That is my one real love in life is programming. Programming is sort of like getting to work a puzzle all day long. I actually enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable. You get to shut out all your other thoughts and just concentrate on this little thing you're trying to do, to make work it. It's nice, very enjoyable.'"
40 (Score:5, Insightful)
... and still coding
Re:40 (Score:4, Interesting)
... and still coding
/ Very nice!
I'm 48, and wish I had another 24 years to do all of the things I want to do coding-wise alone. I haven't learned it all yet, and still want to know how everything works.
It's a great lifestyle after all this time. I own my own firm, work from my home office, get out to the boat on Fridays and work from there if needed (during summer), and make my own time to work on my own terms.
Coding at 48 is great!
Re:40: I'm 55... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been programming since 1977, and I'm still doing it, although my job description hasn't had "programmer" in it since 1984:
(My first job out of university was writing digital signal analysis sw for a research institute, I did that from 1981 to 84.)
During the last few years I've been involved with crypto (AES) and graphics optimization, multicore computing as well as a few programming competitions:
I suspect that I'm probably 20 years older than most of the other quarter/semi-finalists at the two Facebook Hacker Challenges.
The main/only/sufficient reason is of course that I love doing it!
Solving puzzles is something I would pay to do, so getting paid is a great deal imho.
(My official job these days is to be the in-house IT troubleshooter for a very large Norwegian IT company, I manage to sneak in some programming here as well, often some Perl to analyze network trace/log files.)
Terje
60 here... (Score:5, Interesting)
After watching how the various regimes running (and buying, and selling, and outsourcing) my company feel about programmers, I don't think I would ever go into it as a young person today. But a strange thing has happened. Of all the people that have been there all this time, I'm one of the few that has survived all the M&A shenannigans and outsourcings. It seems that those who moved up into management roles were more replaceable than those of us who stayed technical. Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.
This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it. So far, every manager who's engineered the next sell-off of the company has been richly rewarded. The company's for sale again, and I can't imagine anybody being stupid enough to buy it. But fools abound, and I'm sure the current crop has their golden parachutes in order...
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As for when the stupidity will stop, I'll only point out that you just described yourself like a 2012 version of the 2002 Cobol programmer, shortly after they were re-hired/promoted to fix Y2K issues. And there will be certainly be a new incarnation of exactly the same situation 10 years from now, too, just with different technology yet again. "Ask Slashdot 2022: Are Ruby programmers still relevant?"
25 and too old to learn to program??? (Score:4, Informative)
I am 61, and certainly not the oldest still programming. My first 2 paid programming positions involved FORTRAN IV and COBOL, I now use Java. Recently I've played with Python and Groovy.
A few years ago I met a young man in his mid twenties, who said he was too old to learn programming!
I wrote my first program (in BASIC) when I was eighteen, to display what happens when you feed the sine function complex numbers - I did it for fun. The computer was the size of a 4 draw filing cabinet, and had about 4K bytes - not 4 megabytes, nor 4 gigabytes! Now my main development machine has 16 gigabytes.
Currently I am writing a system to to store, retrieve, and display tagged images using Java on Linux. The full system will be backed by a Postgres database and will be accessed by a web front end.
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Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.
This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it.
My company has made similar incorrect assumptions about coders being "cogs in the machine", and a couple years ago the CIO reorganized our entire shop around the concept of cogs, instead of around products. Software now costs roughly four times to produce than what it cost before, takes roughly four times as long to produce, is of overall much lower quality, and the only thing that keeps any little bits of it afloat are those of us who were effective before the re-org. (Needless to say, that re-org drove
Re:40: I'm 55... (Score:5, Insightful)
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That agrees with my experience. After a certain age, there is an assumption that if you haven't been promoted to management, there is something wrong with you. I haven't worked as a programmer for about four years. I still love programming and code for fun, but I'd be happy if my job title never mentioned software again.
I'm in school training for a new career. One in which my 44 years--and anything since the last glacial maximum--is considered "recent." No doubt, I will still use my programming skills i
Re:40: I'm 55... (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience is that I started as a hardware engineer, then spent 25 years as an engineering manager. I now have a job as a programmer, work sane hours, and am a lot more productive than the "one-year-out-of-college" kids who are generally creating as many problems as they're solving. Some of my code is now in the Linux kernel and I'm a lot happier going to work.
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Oh, Wait...
Re:40 (Score:4, Interesting)
Ditto.
Whether I do it for work or for play, I'll always code.
73 and still coding. (Score:5, Interesting)
I did my first coding at 37 on using punch cards and coded for cash the next year. A couple of years ago I had to switch from C/C++ and Windows to Java on LINUX and have learned Java and some LINUX. When my Raspberry Pi arrives in a couple of weeks I'll start on Python! Mostly my job descriptions have been Ecologist with some coding. I look at most of the coding I've done as problem/puzzle solving.
Re:73 and still coding. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is there no +1 respect ?
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I find any kind of fun puzzle like work like programming or CAD are only enjoyable outside of a normal work environment. Once you get into the realm of bosses with deadlines of the day before the project start, and customers who don't want to pay, and the fun game of blame the coder drama to get out of contracts but still get the goods, it's not fun anymore. I recommend people code for fun at any age, working in the industry should be approached with great care.
tell that to the bean counters (Score:5, Interesting)
This just in, programmers would prefer to continue programming at 50.
Re:tell that to the bean counters (Score:4, Insightful)
The Brain is Plastic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Brain is Plastic (Score:5, Informative)
Who paid for your schools, medical care, transportation and all the other infrastructure that you use? Not you.
Re:The Brain is Plastic (Score:4, Insightful)
"Paid for"? Funny!
But seriously, though, you must not be in America, because medical care isn't considered infrastructure here. And the rest of what older generations have left for my generation is pretty laughable. Transportation is horribly inefficient pretty much anywhere outside NYC because all the baby boomers need their own McMansion with their own lawns and gardens, most likely tended by the same people they say should be deported. So now the tallest buildings in most cities are two-story houses, and it's impossible to simply go get groceries without a giant gas-guzzling 5-to-8-seat car that you only drive in alone/with one other person 99% of the time.
And educational quality is horrible in the US for 2 reasons: bad/absent parenting and politically-connected textbook publishers (both of which are, again, on older generations) that put profit ahead of textbook quality; and don't forgot the massive tuition rates my generation is having to pay just for the CHANCE of making a comparable salary (adjusted for inflation) to what our parents made without a degree 30 years ago.
And then there's the retirement age, which is pretty much going to be stuck at 65 for the next few decades so everyone currently above 50 gets to retire by then, effectively contributing to the economy for maybe half of the 80+ years they'll be around. But even all that isn't enough; older people also want lower taxes, which is effectively the same as passing the bill to their kids/grandkids/great-grandkids/great-great/ and so on, because they aren't even willing to give back to society just like society gave to them when they were our age. And let's not even get started on the wonderful global climate disasters we get to inherit while our parents and grandparents are long gone.
And then after all that, older generations accuse ME of being entitled and self-centered? Your generation doesn't exactly get to act morally superior. Like one of the parent posters said, entitlement isn't an age issue, just a personality issue.
Re:The Brain is Plastic (Score:5, Insightful)
I was born and raised in FLORIDA and I still think you're being kind of an ageist jerk here.
I've seen that behavior in over-50s, I've seen it in under-50s. Entitlement isn't an age issue, it's a class issue, or sometimes just a personality issue.
Re:The Brain is Plastic (Score:4, Informative)
The reason that over-50 crowd is asking for help is almost certainly due to deteriorating eyesight and glasses!
First of all, a 50 year old needs 3X the light level as a 20-30 year old, second the progressive glasses most of has to start wearing at this time takes a huge slice out of the normal visual field:
I used to be able to easily locate things that were near the edge of my visual field, with my current (very good/expensive) glasses I need to turn my entire head, not just flick a glance sidewise.
This does mean that I find it far harder to locate items in the Supermarket/grocery store, unless it is the local one where I know where everything is located.
It also means that I will ask store attendants for directions to stuff that I would simply find on my own 15 years ago, simply because I know it will probably save me a lot of time.
Terje
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Re:The Brain is Plastic (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen to that, Brother. I am 52 but most people think I am in my late 30s. Problem is: I have to juggle three DIFFERENT pair of progressive bi-focals just to see what the hell I am doing. This is partly due to all the time I have spent reading and on the computer, partly just due to heredity. I don't know how many times I have been looking for something that was right in front of me.
But this has nothing to do with programming. Or one's IQ.
I think your last statement does apply, though. Older people are less ego driven and more willing to ask questions. The younger coders may not be asking the questions simply because they don't want to appear stupid. So they waste hours Googling things when they could have just asked someone and gotten on with their day. People need to remember that the reason people all go to the same place to get work done is so they can actually interact with those other people who go there too. This was found to be more efficient ... oh ... maybe a few thousand years ago.
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I see your points now, but I have a story from my own life that I hope you consider.
I used to manage a self storage facility. People from all walks of life used it, but some people were become such a problem (couldn't pay their bill on time, got mad that we auctioned their stuff off after not hearing a peep from them for a few (4 to 6) months (no payments at all), had no valid means to contact them, etc. It was very easy to start to feel anyone who used that sort of business was a low-life after a while. Bu
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This is called "selection bias." It is when you assume that what you see or notice most often is actually the majority.
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At least the over 50's crowd can find the store, in all likelihood "the younger set" don't even know what sporting goods are.
Hell, I'd love to code now (Score:2)
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Re:Hell, I'd love to code now (Score:5, Insightful)
tech support! I used to dream of tech support interruptions!
Now I'm doing a bastard child of agile that the company has brought in and I cannot do anything for longer than 2 hours without having to go back to the scrum board for more work. Don't they know they can just point me at a problem and I'll get it solved - it is what I've been doing for several decades after all.
I guess the agile stuff is for the kids who can't concentrate on a task for longer than an hour and have to keep being told what to do or they'll just start looking at facebook and twitter all day.
Oh god, not agile (Score:2)
Re:Oh god, not agile (Score:5, Informative)
oh no.
I've done agile many years back and it as great - iterative development, regular releases, a 'vision' of what was needed to be added to the product per cycle... it worked.
Today... agile seems to be a way of doing massively heavyweight processes. we have 2 scrum boards, we can't decide what the timebox items should be, or how long it'll take to do them, or how many should be in there, or how much planning for the next timebox needs to be done.... gah! its all planning on our agile nonsense.
Its not agile, lets put it that way.
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Agile is for people that can't put together project plans.
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I hate to break it to you, but that isn't agile.
You, as a team, should be planning the tasks and working on them together. You disappearing for two months to "solve" all the problems yourself is the problem.
Actual coding is the smallest part of modern softw (Score:2)
Actual coding is the smallest part of modern software development not just because of all the meetings agile techniques like Scrum require, but also because we're expected to support the code we write instead of just writing it in isolation, tossing it over the wall and expecting some other sucker to maintain it. The theory is that if the developers have to support the code themselves, then they'll pay more attention to quality, reliability, stability and other factors that improve maintainability.
Of course
Coding at 50? Why even ask?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Asking whether geeks should still be coding at fifty is like asking if people should still be having sex at fifty. The answer is stupidly obvious. OF COURSE we'll still be coding at fifty! It may seem revolting to younger folks, and lord knows it does take a little longer to get going. But once we've hit that groove, baby, we're not done in 30 seconds. No, we work that algorithm, and we know how to do it, too. None of those stupid mistakes we made during the frenzied, sweaty all-night coding sessions of our youth, blindly swapping pointers and hoping to avoid another premature segfault. Oh, no. And none of that I'm-too-hot-for-you arrogance, either. We leave our customers satisfied, because - take my word for it - that's the only way they're coming back for more.
... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....
*SOB*
Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!? (Score:5, Funny)
... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....
Boy, are YOU doing it wrong....
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... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....
Boy, are YOU doing it wrong....
Yes, someone needs to introduce him in the field of advanced robotics.
My FemBot3000 will be finished any moment now!
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most coders are too inexperienced (Score:5, Interesting)
Many people move on from programming to management or entirely other careers because it is so hard. What makes most existing systems hard to develop is the unnecessary complexity, lack of or overabstraction and negligence of test code. Management coming from such mess and never seeing anything better can not strive for anything better. It is hard to navigate such an enviroment and stay sane and become productive. Once you succeed it is highly rewarding to coach younger team members. I'm living proof of that and there are plenty more at least in the Finnish agile circles. Career age would be of essence to anyone looking for real successful team leads.
Re:most coders are too inexperienced (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is my strategy. I tell my employer: "Do you want to pay me overtime or do you want the account to slip its deadline? Your choice." If that's drama, get your head out of your ass. If you're not paid by the hour to code, you're doing it wrong. I keep hoping my employer will answer "yes, we'll pay overtime" but they never do.
What, is that somehow unfair. Well too fucking bad. My time is worth money.
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I wouldn't say coding is hard.
Coding is not hard. Being the one to do the grunt work is. You'll always be on the bottom of the corporate ladder and in the middle of the shit storm, regardless of skill and experience. You can either stop caring or switch careers. At 36, I am still in doubt which one it will be.
Another thing making it hard to be a (non-freelance) coder, is that most of the time is spent on either trivial stuff or uninteresting problems. I know several coders who would love to work in innovative projects, but are forced to
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I don't think "hard" is the right word but it more like "Coding is a pain in the ass". It's not the coding in and of itself that makes it so, it's the dealing with a legacy environment and integrating with less than well designed systems that makes things difficult and frustrating. If you're, doing greenfield development, then you don't have to worry about that stuff and it's all a bunch of fluffy white clouds but if you work in the environment that most programmers do, there are few fluffy white clouds t
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I wouldn't say coding is hard.
That depends on what you're coding.
Re:most coders are too inexperienced (Score:4, Interesting)
There seems to be some truth to this, in my own experience. I find the solutions my younger colleagues invent are just too complicated and gnarly. They haven't yet found how to see the underlying simplicity in the problem and solution - and more importantly, they don't even understand that they should be doing that.
Mentoring is very satisfying, particularly when someone has a "got-it" moment, and their code improves forever thereafter. But I find that is rare. Many people I've worked with - even really, really bright people - just aren't interested in seeing a bigger picture. In fact, I'd go further. Most people will never do this - they will just solve the problem immediately in front of them, without any regard for how the whole thing hangs together, or the semantics of their construction, or the future ease of maintenance of their code.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure it's really about inexperience, or hardness of career. It's the difference between being a journeyman or a master, and very few it seems have a genuine desire of mastery in what they do.
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I'd agree totally with that, but I also blame the languages we use - there's often been a discussion concerning whether the "easy to use" languages and their "handholding" IDEs are corrupting the youth by making them turn coding into an exercise in snippets, or cut&paste, or click and its filled out for you.
Its no longer a problem to solve, its a problem that has 1 solution that you have to find. Coding might have turned from a puzzle game where you have to think of how it all fits together, into an adv
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I have to say, I'm not one of those who think that making programming easier is making programming worse.
I've been programming for over 30 years (first experience being with hex keypads, teletype terminals and batch processing systems back in the 70s!). I love refactoring support, debugging, in-line help, static analysis, code navigation and folding, documentation generation, etc. They make me much, much, more productive. Anyone who thinks using a text editor, command line or punch-cards is superior is we
Nifty, for sure (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope I'm still solving little puzzles like that when I'm 50 but I also solved those when I was 25. There's nothing wrong with that, but if that's all you do then you're probably going to be at the same point career and pay grade-wise at 50 as at 25. If you've become the CEO of SAS, that's probably because you're solving a lot of other issues that you couldn't solve as a 25 year old. If you have experience, you have to find positions where that gives you leverage and not all of them are like that. It doesn't matter if you've been flipping burgers for 30 years and perfected your burger flipping technique, you're still very replaceable by a newbie. If you want to be a coder specialist, make sure it's a specialist job and not just writing your average glue code. It's easy enough for the CEO to say that, he can pick whatever problem he finds complex and interesting to do as a hobby, the actual employees don't have that luxury. Unless you're talking about working on an OSS or pet project outside of work.
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Problem solving doesnt get better, you take less stupid risks at 50.
20 year old - Server is down? let's try jump starting it with a pair of jumper cables from the other server!
50 year old - Server is down? Fine, I'll go grab the spare from the closet, you get the backup tapes just in case. I told you the spare should be online all the time as a hot failover...
and yes I have jump started a server back to life again. the power supply had failed and could not recover from a power outage. jumping the 1
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I hope I'm still solving little puzzles like that when I'm 50 but I also solved those when I was 25. There's nothing wrong with that, but if that's all you do then you're probably going to be at the same point career and pay grade-wise at 50 as at 25..
Exactly, at 50, you will still be solving those little puzzles, but you're going solve them with 30 seconds thought and 10 lines of code that runs first time: they are just that, little problems that you have encountered a hundred times before.
But, if you want to be at a different career/pay point, you're also going to be solving big puzzles. Many of these are so big that people don't even see them as puzzles until you implement the solution, then man-years of work and confusion just melt away.
The problem,
Coding and meditation (Score:2)
Two great pleasures of life you can still enjoy at 55. Other things, not so much.
Sorry, no (Score:2)
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I actually did all that and I reaped plenty of um, err....benefits. Current changes are both hormonal and psychological. I just don't feel as needy for sex, affection or anything else. The obsessive sexual fantasies of my youth have also disappeared. Everyone is different, of course. I certainly wouldn't quarrel with anyone at any age enjoying romantic interludes of any nature.
My problem at the age of 45 with coding.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Switching between languages takes time. Programming Java, then C, then Assembler... It takes me a solid 4 hours to switch between languages if I have to do anything complex. If I have been coding in C for months and then Oh here's a new embedded project we need done in assembler... My brain doesn't have the drivers loaded for assembler and it has to search the tape backup archives for that driver and load it into operating memory.
Then I hit the ground running full speed.
Back in my 20's I was able to switch language sets at random within a moment's notice. In fact I was at one point writing in 3 languages at once. 4GL for the accounting system, C writing printer drivers for that Xenix 386 OS we were running at the office, and assembler for my 68hc11 wyse terminal multiplexer. I figured out how to get 16 text terminals to communicate uber fast speeds over a single pair of dry copper wires from the main store to the second store location. But then I also did not need coffee and drank an epic amount of beer and rum every day...
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... but the code your wrote; more maintainable now, or then? That's really the important part of software development in most cases. I used to aim for code that ran as fast as possible, and was frequently so complex I had trouble debugging it myself. Now I aim for "fast enough", generally error free, but maintainable by someone with far less skill. When you know a language well, you can write beautiful poetry.
Reasons why older coders might write plainer code? (Score:2)
Interesting point. I'm returning just now to re-use/update/port some stuff I wrote a while back, some of it 5+ years ago, and even some bits from 24 years ago. Sometimes I find the rationale was clear enough, other times I have to kick myself before I can figure it out again, and there is one awkward little knot that still works but I completely forgot how and why, and so far I didn't manage to untie it.
What this does remind me, though, is that my
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I rarely write comments any longer, and only use them when I can't make the code any clearer (or to explain *why* I did something, rather than what I'm trying to do.). 'What' comments rarely get updated when the code changes, and can frequently do more harm than good. I feel a little sad when I feel I need to add a comment to explain what I'm doing. Computing power helps these days. Back in the old days when writing realtime code, the stack overhead from breaking things up into functions/methods would kil
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Comments can become indispensable when the reason for putting something in (and the criterion for its correctness) is external to the code itself. I used sometimes to think "it must be obvious where that came from", but now with failing memory I often find it's not as obvious as I thought it should be. :(
-wb-
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That would be the *why* type of comments. Frequently a small paragraph rather than a simple one-liner as well. I think the failing memory (or sometimes it seems like it) can be a benefit; you know that in 6 months you *won't* remember, where in the the past, you *thought* you would.
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Hiring a 50-year old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hiring a 50-year old... (Score:4, Insightful)
The flip side of that is, who'll hire a 50-year old coder, or even keep him or her on the damn payroll? Even at reduced wages it's a crap shoot.
I don't have any problems getting hired. I keep myself up to date with what's current, and I have thirty years experience so I know what not to do; and so I can produce higher quality code faster than people half my age. I can't work as long hours as I used to - I can't hold concentration for seventeen hour days any more; and I value my free time more. But I'm good, and I'm productive, and I'm never short of work.
If you get worse at your craft as you grow older, you're doing something wrong.
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But then obviously it is going to be a crap shoot no matter what age they are...
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As a fifty+ year old coder/designer/architect, I just went back to do another startup where I get to write code again and to mentor the rest of the team. The reason to write code is that I want to build something and have it used by customers (preferably paying ones). I can have the biggest impact in a small startup where we want to change the world (or at least a small, profitable, segment of it!)
At 50+, your priorities do change somewhat -- family and kids are more important -- but these all encourage you
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But I keep up with stuff, svn and now git, Ruby as it's related to Perl, Erlang because it's interesting, PHP because half the open-source-web is coded in it [ugh], not-Java though I could probably
I've done management and all that stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and I've gone back to coding. I'm good at it and I know I'm good at it. I'm only 56 now, but I expect to be still coding for a living when I'm 70.
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Been there done that too. I am 40 and don't plan on getting back to management.
All I have to do is see what my Dad did... (Score:3)
He was designing and troubleshooting analog and digital hardware.... radio and battery systems until the day he could legally tell his employer to fuck off and collect his Navy retirement and SSI...
He knows more about practical engineering than I ever will. And we still kick ideas around. He retired but did not stop being an Engineer.
I'm 46 and still writing code, and back at school for Biz Admin. I got to go back to my roots focusing on bare metal, and more recently embedded LINUX.
I'll stop writing code when you pull my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard.
Grumpy Mode ON (Score:2)
May I paraphrase?: "That silly stuff engineers do? Fun and easy compared to the really hard important grown-up job us executives do."
Programming? Math! (Score:3)
You guys should get into math.
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deadline (Score:2)
Why is this even a news item? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mental exercise significantly decreases the chances of dementia [livescience.com]. I'm 56 and involved in lots of things, not the least of which is coding for a large company. Someone once said "learning keeps you young" and he was right. My last career switch was at 53. I picked up a new, fairly technical hobby at 54 at which I'm becoming fairly decent. Earlier this year I completed a 4,400 mile solo motorcycle trip.
There are concessions, of course. My knees are blown out. I can't run or bicycle anymore, and put those things away with true regret. But other things have replaced this. Walks with the dog, (with knee braces) long motorcycle trips, and driving daughter and her friends to skiing trips. (I hang out in the bar and write. Some of my best articles have come from there.)
If you think your life is over at 50, I can tell you from experience, it is only if you want it to be. I see some of my contemporaries sitting in their barcaloungers in front of the boob tube waiting for life to end, and it makes me sad. A few of them used to be sharp, and can no longer carry on a conversation that doesn't involve reminiscing. The people I associate with tend to be decades younger than I, because they're still doing stuff and I am unwilling to give up on doing stuff.
At 65, my mother had a bad heart attack, resulting in a triple bypass. She quit smoking, started a new business, and now in her seventies is a successful small businessperson. But the biggest change I've noticed is that for the first time in years her thoughts are clear, she can carry on a coherent conversation, and she's interested in learning new things.
I thought it had been pretty much settled that activity (mental and physical) tends to keep the parts working. I'm not sure why this is a news item. But I note other threads like this, even in Slashdot, of people worried that their careers will be over at 40. Well, maybe if you're a trapeze artist, but otherwise, it's pretty much up to you.
If we don't do coding, what exactly do we do? (Score:3)
Not only management is an entirely different field requiring a different personality and skill set, but it's a pyramid scheme. By definition, only a minority of engineers can become managers. So if the choice is learning an entirely new profession on level field with newcomers or staying good at what you are good at, have tons of experience in and which is still in high demand, I think it's a no brainer. I fully expect to be coding until retirement, although I do notice that my average work day is 2-3 hours of actually writing code and the rest of the time helping others.
coding is absolutely necessary for techies (Score:3)
My 'creds' : coding since 1968, not as a career or software jock, but for fun and to support my research/analysis as student and engineer (in that order :-) ).
While you don't have to be a total c++/java/perl expert to do engineering, you sure as heck have to be able to move on from slide rules and TI-88's to actual programming if you want to be a productive engineer.
I'm 57 and continue to enjoy writing stuff in R (as well as explaining to people why LabView is a recipe for disaster if you try to apply it to large projects). Then again, I like abstract algebra and topology, so I suppose I'm an outlier (yeah, I do stats too).
You get to shut out all your other thoughts (Score:3)
No, not any more. When I was a young programmer, you could disappear into an office and just code all day. But one thing that has happened in the last couple of decades is that coding has become much more collaborative. Even if you are not doing extreme programming, with another coder practically in your lap, test-driven development, continuous integration and methodologies like Scrum mean that you are spending a lot of your day with QA and other devs. Break something and you have 20 guys on your back to fix it, stat. Put in some nifty but unorthodox code and then get it reviewed out of the product. I'm sure there are lots of people who thrive in that environment, and it does tend to improve the quality level of the software, but it means that you don't get to fly solo anymore, and that is what drove a lot of introvert/geek types into programming in the first place. It's also a bit of a shift if you haven't grown up as a dev in the new world, although I've been able to deal with it.
Re:Good for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
If coding is like typing for you, you've never done any real programming. Coding is about thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems. I don't think that's boring at all.
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. Coding is about thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems.
On very rare occasion.
The rest of the time it's tapping out boring and obvious solutions to depressingly uninteresting problems.
Salt in the wound: The longer you're at it, you'll find that more problems that once would have been interesting are simple and terrifyingly dull.
My advice? Switch fields as early as you can, write code as a hobby. You'll want to kill yourself after a few years otherwise.
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How sad for you! I'm 50+, and still find coding to be "thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems"
Just saying... There was this guy named George Marsaglia. Occassionally posting on comp.lang.c and elsewhere with new algorithms for generating random numbers with a period of 10^45000 or so (ten to the fortyfifththousandth power). Then no posts for a bit, then someone posted he died aged 86.
I can only hope to be fit enough at 86 to come up with elegant solutions to interesting problems.
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Waiting for some old guy to fix all those "elegant" solutions.
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Do you also HATE writing, HATE speaking, HATE singing? Typing is just another form of communication. If you HATE it, you probably don't type well. Learn.
By the way, if your programmatic abilities match your cut and paste abilities..... learn to edit. It's necessary in programming as well.
Re:That NOT what I said. (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, granted, I misread you on purpose, go for the easy mod points.
Still, do you really think talking to your computer, or drawing pictures for it, is going to make programming easier or more fun or less work? I very strongly doubt that. When programming becomes repetitive, you should find some way to automate that part; code it differently, develop a tool or invent a new language. And ultimately, it would be great if some AI would just write programs for our problems. Before that, there will be some typing. But not too much if you do it right.
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Graphical programming has been attempted before. It turns out there's more to programming than just connecting boxes together, although it did find some uses in audio processing and such.
Re:Good for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
As for me at 48, sitting in front of the computer all day just pains me - literally. No matter how often I take breaks, I have a lot of tension that runs down from my neck to my ass.
That's exactly how I felt at age 19 as I was stacking 80 pound salt bags on pallets for roughly $5/hr. About a week after I got my first "real" desk job, the most surprising observation I had, other than the obvious "now I take a shower before work rather than after work" was that I wasn't in some level of constant pain. Getting old is no fun but it beats the alternative, and I'm not thinking there's anything that can help once you get old enough, by that I mean that stacking 80 pound salt bags would probably just kill me at my current age, not make my back feel better. I had back problems a couple years back until I (re-)started serious (as in, need a shower afterwards) weightlifting during lunch hour, the key being if your physical therapist says do X Y and Z do exactly X Y Z no improvising or excuses.
I can't wait for the day when I can tell the computer verbally or draw a picture the algorithm and never ever have to type another line of code - ever.
The bandwidth for that is almost infinitely low compared to typing. You'd basically have to invent your own glyphs and language, or spend hours drawing thousands of pictures. You may want to look into the CAD drafting profession, where you get to spend hours drawing the equivalent of a couple lines of text. Another fun one is wedding photography.
Also try a less verbose language. I've seen 1000+ line java programs replaced by about 5 lines of Perl/CPAN... two use statements, two cpan calls, and an immense line noise appearing regex between them. Unsurprisingly, neither extreme is healthy.
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The English module increases the readability and understanding of Perl code, and it is a big step toward alleviating the boggling effect that raw Perl code sometimes has on new programmers. The English module provides a mapping between Perl's eclectic punctuation (special) variables with an English name corresponding to each one. The regular-expression variables that correspond to the three components of a matched string, for example, are often difficult to remember, even for the experienced Perl programmer.
http://www.brainbell.com/tutors/Perl/Usability_and_Simplicity.htm [brainbell.com]
Re:Good for you! (Score:5, Informative)
Its' just a tool to solve some other problem I have. I can't wait for the day when I can tell the computer verbally or draw a picture the algorithm and never ever have to type another line of code - ever.
well, the good news is that you can do this today, it's been around for at least ten years. Its called UML. what happens in your fantasy is that you draw your code layouts in boxes with various types of lines to link the objects together, then click a button and the whole thing gets generated into your favourite language. you then fill in a few of the details (ie the implementation inside some of those objects) and you're done.
I also wrote a system that did something similar - you wrote objects that could be dropped onto a canvas designer like a flowchart and wire up inputs and outputs (yes, a lot like biztalk, only we did it before biztalk came out, though I guess taking our product to MS for performance testing in their labs was a mistake).
Ok, you can stop reading here, the rest of us... I think everyone knows the problems with UML - write the big diagram, put it somewhere for management to look at, then ignore it as you work on code. It simply wasn't expressive enough to use for real work.
As for our product, it worked quite well, you could drop GUI components (html-based) onto it too and it would all magically make an application the user worked through and a business analyst could update when business requirements changed. Trouble was, the complexity of the thing increased exponentially. An app with a dozen components was easy, once you started work on a real-world app, the complexity meant you needed a couple dozen BAs working on it, It would have been more efficient just handing it to programmers and telling them the initial requirements are that the back-end rules will change.
So I don't think there will ever be a shift away from typing code, although practically every app I've seen in recent years has tried some form of configuration replacement (like .net, where everything you used to write in code is now in .config files, and everything you used to put in config is now hard-coded) or custom rolled ones that implement configurable business logic.
Re:Good for you! (Score:5, Funny)
well, the good news is that you can do this today, it's been around for at least ten years. Its called UML. what happens in your fantasy is that you draw your code layouts in boxes with various types of lines to link the objects together, then click a button and the whole thing gets generated into your favourite language. you then fill in a few of the details (ie the implementation inside some of those objects) and you're done.
THIS IS WHAT UML TOOLS PROPONENTS REALLY BELIEVE.
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Re:age has little to do with it though (Score:5, Interesting)
coding used to feel like freedom because of all the possibilities, and now it feels like chains because of all the same old hurdles..
I'm starting to have fun finding cunning ways of working around the hurdles now that I didn't have the experience to make work in the past.
I try to make time to try out my own ideas and to explore away from work. I find it keeps me refreshed and interested.
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Yeah b/c you are an Anonymous Coward.
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