9 ms·

I'm thinking I'll code till the day I die. So much cool tech is always coming out - so much to play with and invent! I also have very time consuming hobbies - r

by nevster 10y ago

I'm thinking I'll code till the day I die. So much cool tech is always coming out - so much to play with and invent! I also have very time consuming hobbies - reading, playing video games, pen and paper role playing games, board games.

ams6110 10y ago
I don't know if everyone is this way, but at 50 I am losing a little of the starry-eyed excitement. I've seen a lot of the same ideas come around again and again as a new great thing. And yet the pace of change is so fast, if you try to stay current you feel like you never really become an expert in anything. You get jaded. If and when I "retire" I would not see myself not working, but I do think I might do somthing completely different and new. I could see walking away from computer tech entirely. In fact that idea is pretty attractive, honestly. I'm old enough to clearly remember the days before the internet, before mobile phones, before being constantly connected to everything 24x7. When you would leave the house or office, nobody would be able to get in touch with you and you could do what you wanted to do without interruption or distraction. It was nice.
- tintor 10y ago
  > When you would leave the house or office, nobody would be able to get in touch with you and you could do what you wanted to do without interruption or distraction. It was nice. It was nice? You can still leave your phone at home.
  - conceit 10y ago
    apparently, for some, many even, this puts them under some stress and pressure, socially and organisatoric.
    - 50CNT 10y ago
      In which case you need to delineate your channels of access more clearly. Move your main communication to something more asynchronous (email, text, wechat/whatsapp, slack), set a time where things will be checked, and perhaps offer an emergency line over real-time messaging (phone calls fit the bill best). Most things are not time critical, and a sizable portion of the things that are, are not mission critical.
      - conceit 10y ago
        the emergency line is the stressor I ment.
        50CNT 10y ago
        The emergency line should almost never be used. It sounds like you have too many emergencies.
    - richev 10y ago
      This certainly applies to me. The workaround is to just let those close to you know that you'll be off the grid for a while but are still ok. Then you don't need to worry about them worrying.
- Retra 10y ago
  There are a lot of unsolved problems in the world, and computers are a great place to explore their potential solutions. I don't really understand this "same ideas come around again and again", because maybe that means you're not properly keeping up with the state of the art. Maybe you should broaden your horizons?
  - clentaminator 10y ago
    A lot of the "unsolved problems in the world" are either problems that more technology won't solve, or aren't things that can be solved easily by current technology. They are social and human problems, which essentially boil down to "how" we live. I think that poster's point about the same ideas coming round again and again was that in some areas of technology "keeping up with the state of the art" is just a case of re-learning how to do something that you already understand and know how to do, but in a way that is now structured differently. Broadening your horizons can (in some cases) end up in you seeing the underlying same-ness in a lot of things.
    - Retra 10y ago
      I didn't say technology would solve those problems. I said technology can be used to explore potential solutions. I understand the point; you've restated it exactly as I understand it. That's why I brought up unsolved problems. The state of the art here is very often new and novel approaches that have not been explored in enough depth. Take color theory, for example. I want a function that maps points outside visible Lab to the nearest visible point in Lab. Sure, that's a solved problem, but if you don't already know how to solve it, you've got something to learn. More importantly, can it be done quickly? Can it be generalized to other color spaces? What is the best data structure for encoding only visible points in Lab? Then there's a problem of generating maximally orthogonal gradient curves covering an image. There are purely technical problems. Can you solve them analytically? Will it help you to learn Topology or Tensor calculus? You won't know until you try. And there are new results in any of these fields coming out every day. Pick up a textbook and think about how to write software that will be capable of solving all the problems in that book. Does it already exist? Is it optimal? Easy to use? Everything looks the same when you're saying "I'm just applying some abstraction to a problem and encoding it into a machine using several layers of translation." But that shouldn't make you cynical, as that leaves plenty of room for innovation and learning. But if you're thinking "this new framework/language is just doing more of the same," then maybe stop focussing on frameworks and languages and instead focus on the problems they should be solving rather than the ones they actually do. And even there, you should have no problem seeing syntactic and efficiency hiccups that might be ameliorated through an intense exploratory creative design session.
- somethingsimple 10y ago
  I'm 28 and have lost all the starry-eyed excitement :( I was top of class in college, then advanced in huge strides in the first years of my career; now I just want to go home and read a non-technical book. I might be burnt out.
  - andyjdavis 10y ago
    Entirely possible. When I was about your age I wound up taking off and teaching English to little kids in Thailand. That was a great experience that involved a refreshing amount of time away from a computer. I was able to pick up my career afterwards easily enough. I actually wound up working on education related software so my little teaching experience may have even helped. The only lasting (sort of) negative was that I met so many people in Thailand who were living dramatically different lives that the idea of living out the rest of my days in a cubicle become less palatable.
    - dcw303 10y ago
      I did the same at the same age as well, except I was teaching English in Japan. After only a few months of that, I had a burning desire to be back in a coding career, and to be as far away from eikaiwas as possible. If you've never worked outside the tech industry, you would be amazed at how good we get it.
      - andyjdavis 10y ago
        Lol. Very true. As much as I enjoyed teaching 6-8 year old and essentially playing games and singing songs all day having to clock in and out, a strict dress code and having to complete vast volumes of dead tree paperwork wasn't super fun. Especially when compared to software companies I have worked for. Flexible hours, free snacks, and wear whatever you want.
  - clentaminator 10y ago
    27 and I feel the same way, in that I don't feel much excitement around technology for technology's sake anymore. The latest version of macOS? Neat, but unlikely to be as "game changing" as Apple might have you believe. The rate of change in some areas of technology can make you think that you're missing out on some kind of important development, however if things are changing that fast then perhaps nothing is really changing at all. Mostly it's important that in whatever you're working on you're applying technology to a problem or area that you find interest in, otherwise the only "fun" can be found in the tech stack, which is not (in my not-too-humble opinion) a good place to find enjoyment. You can enjoy your tools, sure, but it shouldn't be the case that "We're using X, Y and Z" is more important than "to make Foo".
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  I feel a little like that sometimes (I'm 52) but I put most of it down to the commercial aspects, money seems to sap the joy out of most activities.
IndianAstronaut 10y ago
I worked with a 63 year old who didn't plan on retirement. He was physically and mentally active. Always up to date on new frameworks, languages, etc. He could also pick a new project very rapidly.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Had he been in development for 40+ years? Or was it a newer line of work for him?
  - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
    Yeah, he was in development. Definitely a different sort since he used to talk about Pascal and having hard drives the size of a small car.

by nevster 10y ago

ams6110 10y ago

I don't know if everyone is this way, but at 50 I am losing a little of the starry-eyed excitement. I've seen a lot of the same ideas come around again and again as a new great thing. And yet the pace of change is so fast, if you try to stay current you feel like you never really become an expert in anything. You get jaded. If and when I "retire" I would not see myself not working, but I do think I might do somthing completely different and new. I could see walking away from computer tech entirely. In fact that idea is pretty attractive, honestly. I'm old enough to clearly remember the days before the internet, before mobile phones, before being constantly connected to everything 24x7. When you would leave the house or office, nobody would be able to get in touch with you and you could do what you wanted to do without interruption or distraction. It was nice.

tintor 10y ago
> When you would leave the house or office, nobody would be able to get in touch with you and you could do what you wanted to do without interruption or distraction. It was nice. It was nice? You can still leave your phone at home.
- conceit 10y ago
  apparently, for some, many even, this puts them under some stress and pressure, socially and organisatoric.
  - 50CNT 10y ago
    In which case you need to delineate your channels of access more clearly. Move your main communication to something more asynchronous (email, text, wechat/whatsapp, slack), set a time where things will be checked, and perhaps offer an emergency line over real-time messaging (phone calls fit the bill best). Most things are not time critical, and a sizable portion of the things that are, are not mission critical.
    - conceit 10y ago
      the emergency line is the stressor I ment.
      - 50CNT 10y ago
        The emergency line should almost never be used. It sounds like you have too many emergencies.
  - richev 10y ago
    This certainly applies to me. The workaround is to just let those close to you know that you'll be off the grid for a while but are still ok. Then you don't need to worry about them worrying.
Retra 10y ago
There are a lot of unsolved problems in the world, and computers are a great place to explore their potential solutions. I don't really understand this "same ideas come around again and again", because maybe that means you're not properly keeping up with the state of the art. Maybe you should broaden your horizons?
- clentaminator 10y ago
  A lot of the "unsolved problems in the world" are either problems that more technology won't solve, or aren't things that can be solved easily by current technology. They are social and human problems, which essentially boil down to "how" we live. I think that poster's point about the same ideas coming round again and again was that in some areas of technology "keeping up with the state of the art" is just a case of re-learning how to do something that you already understand and know how to do, but in a way that is now structured differently. Broadening your horizons can (in some cases) end up in you seeing the underlying same-ness in a lot of things.
  - Retra 10y ago
    I didn't say technology would solve those problems. I said technology can be used to explore potential solutions. I understand the point; you've restated it exactly as I understand it. That's why I brought up unsolved problems. The state of the art here is very often new and novel approaches that have not been explored in enough depth. Take color theory, for example. I want a function that maps points outside visible Lab to the nearest visible point in Lab. Sure, that's a solved problem, but if you don't already know how to solve it, you've got something to learn. More importantly, can it be done quickly? Can it be generalized to other color spaces? What is the best data structure for encoding only visible points in Lab? Then there's a problem of generating maximally orthogonal gradient curves covering an image. There are purely technical problems. Can you solve them analytically? Will it help you to learn Topology or Tensor calculus? You won't know until you try. And there are new results in any of these fields coming out every day. Pick up a textbook and think about how to write software that will be capable of solving all the problems in that book. Does it already exist? Is it optimal? Easy to use? Everything looks the same when you're saying "I'm just applying some abstraction to a problem and encoding it into a machine using several layers of translation." But that shouldn't make you cynical, as that leaves plenty of room for innovation and learning. But if you're thinking "this new framework/language is just doing more of the same," then maybe stop focussing on frameworks and languages and instead focus on the problems they should be solving rather than the ones they actually do. And even there, you should have no problem seeing syntactic and efficiency hiccups that might be ameliorated through an intense exploratory creative design session.
somethingsimple 10y ago
I'm 28 and have lost all the starry-eyed excitement :( I was top of class in college, then advanced in huge strides in the first years of my career; now I just want to go home and read a non-technical book. I might be burnt out.
- andyjdavis 10y ago
  Entirely possible. When I was about your age I wound up taking off and teaching English to little kids in Thailand. That was a great experience that involved a refreshing amount of time away from a computer. I was able to pick up my career afterwards easily enough. I actually wound up working on education related software so my little teaching experience may have even helped. The only lasting (sort of) negative was that I met so many people in Thailand who were living dramatically different lives that the idea of living out the rest of my days in a cubicle become less palatable.
  - dcw303 10y ago
    I did the same at the same age as well, except I was teaching English in Japan. After only a few months of that, I had a burning desire to be back in a coding career, and to be as far away from eikaiwas as possible. If you've never worked outside the tech industry, you would be amazed at how good we get it.
    - andyjdavis 10y ago
      Lol. Very true. As much as I enjoyed teaching 6-8 year old and essentially playing games and singing songs all day having to clock in and out, a strict dress code and having to complete vast volumes of dead tree paperwork wasn't super fun. Especially when compared to software companies I have worked for. Flexible hours, free snacks, and wear whatever you want.
- clentaminator 10y ago
  27 and I feel the same way, in that I don't feel much excitement around technology for technology's sake anymore. The latest version of macOS? Neat, but unlikely to be as "game changing" as Apple might have you believe. The rate of change in some areas of technology can make you think that you're missing out on some kind of important development, however if things are changing that fast then perhaps nothing is really changing at all. Mostly it's important that in whatever you're working on you're applying technology to a problem or area that you find interest in, otherwise the only "fun" can be found in the tech stack, which is not (in my not-too-humble opinion) a good place to find enjoyment. You can enjoy your tools, sure, but it shouldn't be the case that "We're using X, Y and Z" is more important than "to make Foo".
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
I feel a little like that sometimes (I'm 52) but I put most of it down to the commercial aspects, money seems to sap the joy out of most activities.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

I worked with a 63 year old who didn't plan on retirement. He was physically and mentally active. Always up to date on new frameworks, languages, etc. He could also pick a new project very rapidly.

ams6110 10y ago
Had he been in development for 40+ years? Or was it a newer line of work for him?
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  Yeah, he was in development. Definitely a different sort since he used to talk about Pascal and having hard drives the size of a small car.