What's the Shelf Life of a Programmer? 388
Esther Schindler writes "Why is it that young developers imagine that older programmers can't program in a modern environment? Too many of us of a 'certain age' are facing an IT work environment that is hostile to older workers. Lately, Steven Vaughan-Nichols has been been noticing that the old meme about how grandpa can't understand iPhones, Linux, or the cloud is showing up more often even as it's becoming increasingly irrelevant. The truth is: Many older developers are every bit as good as young programmers, and he cites plenty of example of still-relevant geeks to prove it. And he writes, 'Sadly, while that should have put an end to the idea that long hours are a fact of IT life, this remnant of our factory-line past lingers both in high tech and in other industries. But what really matters is who's productive and who's not.'"
Young people thinking they know everything? (Score:5, Funny)
This has never happened before
Re:5 Years (Score:5, Funny)
Five.
Even frozen, no more than a year. Eat them before then, certainly before 5 years go by. Otherwise you might get sick.
Re:Depends (Score:5, Funny)
Depends on the programmer!
Bah. Continence has nothing to do with being a good programmer.
It depends... (Score:5, Funny)
Have you kept them out of the sun and filled them with preservatives such as redbull?
Shelf life is far longer that way.
Re:At the ripe old age of 38... (Score:2, Funny)
Old programmers are like old wine (Score:5, Funny)
Old programmers are like old wine; we have no shelf life. As we age, we get better. We also get more expensive. If you pour us into the new wineskin of long hours, low pay, and other kinds of abuse, we burst your bubble and leak out. Put us in the old wineskins, preserve us with reasonable working hours, pay us well, and we'll reward you with the best patches you have ever seen. Keep away the patches coming from new wine, or you'll tear your garment and your hair. After trying us, you'll too say "truly, the old is better", and then continue "however, our shareholders demand higher profits this quarter and prefer 'cheaper'".
Re:What is the shell life of a dentist ? (Score:4, Funny)
Do you know what is the shell life of a dentist ?
Same as a programmer: 3-5 days unless watered. 3-5 weeks unless fed.
Re:Young people thinking they know everything? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Young people thinking they know everything? (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly. It's just like all these old guys in their 30s and 40s or even 50s who learned C and C++ and are currently unemployed, because nobody uses C and/or C++ anymore and these old geezers didn't bother learning CoffeeScript, Clojure, Haskell, GO, and HTML5 which has ubiquitously replaced C/C++ all across the industry.
It was a nice ride for those fat-cat geezers, for the five or ten years that C/C++ was used in the industry. It's just such a shame everyone has moved on and everything in the industry runs on Ruby and Chrome OS, now. Gosh.
Re:Depends (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is there to dispute? (Score:2, Funny)
You had text files? I had to patch sectors on the disk!
Re:What is there to dispute? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:If I Only Had a Brain (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly, that's so insulting to the profession. Can't we just call them "assholes" or "douchebags" like every other profession?