13 ms·

I am getting to old geek status myself. From a more cynical perspective, I am not sure if we can compete with early twenty-somethings who are unjaded and buy in

by daemonk 10y ago

I am getting to old geek status myself. From a more cynical perspective, I am not sure if we can compete with early twenty-somethings who are unjaded and buy into the silicon valley mystique. They are willing to work 12 hour days and still do the faux-japanese salarymen afterwork socializing that supposedly builds "culture". Older geeks don't buy into this ping-pong table propaganda. Tech companies probably won't be able to squeeze all the extra work out of us in the name of passion and culture. I guess the question is, can experience/skill/efficiency really out-produce a legion of young programmers who are willing to work 1.5-2X the hours? I have no idea.

Jean-Philipe 10y ago
> ping-pong table propaganda Thank you for enriching my vocabulary with this wonderful word!
- bballer 10y ago
  Uh, that's a phrase, not a word...
Swizec 10y ago
A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. No matter how little they work or how much better you are individually. But 1-on-1? Experience wins evey time. I'm not old old yet, but I do have the most experience[1] in my team. Spend the least time at work, strictly 8h/day, and am easily the top contributor by any engineering metric you can think of. Wish I could explain why or how, but the best I've been able to surmize is "I just get more done and spend less time going down wrong rabbit holes". [1] most experience with our particular stack/domain, not necessarily most general irl software engineering experience
- narag 10y ago
  A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. I wouldn't be so sure. It depends on the problem you're solving. Of course for routine work it would be like that.
  - chrisbennet 10y ago
    And this ^^^ is what experience sounds like. A team is certainly the right tool for some situations but often the toughest routes require a single very very good climber.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    By definition most work is routine. And yes, for phd-level (or almost) research work into new territories, one person teams are best.
- huherto 10y ago
  > A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. No matter how little they work or how much better you are individually. Furthermore, that team will also outproduce a 25 people team.
drvdevd 10y ago
I've been into programming most of my life, but actually didn't get started professionally until my mid-to-late 20s. This gave me a unique view of said propaganda. It certainly lives everywhere including outside SV. I've been able to quickly recognize it being applied and thus desire other, better forms of compensation. I think this is a skill we should strive to teach younger programmers, because if properly applied across the entire industry, we can raise standards across the market. Just because they're willing to working 1.5-2X the hours doesn't mean they should be. Your time is valuable no matter how old you are
- daemonk 10y ago
  Yeah definitely. I actually work in academia (I guess I wasn't very qualified to speak about SV). But it's the same shtick everywhere. Passion has become an euphemism for soft corporate brain-washing. I am reminded of this blog article by an ad executive before his death where he raised similar points about his industry: http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-perspective/ http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-p...
  - superJimmy64 10y ago
    >(You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ’em up and let ’em go.) Great link: Very, VERY insightful.
    - drvdevd 10y ago
      Agreed. What an excellent read! Highly recommended.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I always like to think of passion in the classical meaning (like "the passion of Christ") when I read crap about being passionate at work.
- js8 10y ago
  > Your time is valuable no matter how old you are I disagree, but maybe that would explain it, your time is actually more valuable (for you) as you grow older.
jwr 10y ago
I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. Inexperienced young programmers working 2x the hours do not necessarily produce Output That Works (I know, I've been one myself). Sure, not every company will realize that, but then again, you don't necessarily want to work for every ping-pong table company, either. Cultural fit and all that.
- uola 10y ago
  Honestly, even as I'm getting older, this isn't at all obvious to me. Someone with five years solid experience with web development might very well be far more effective than someone with twenty years experience of working in corners of large companies with various technologies, especially when you consider the expected salary. I think it good that people are talking about these things, but sometime it seem like people think it's a big conspiracy, rather than a factor of how the ecosystem and market looks.
  - dfsegoat 10y ago
    I am with you on this - it is what causes me a lot of anxiety but what also drives me to at least know about "all the shiney things" that the new breed of engineers basically come equipped with standard.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    I came to this realization a few years ago. I found that while my judgment was still improving, my output wasn't and my ability to think through problems wasn't where it used to be, especially when it came to the tiny details. So I moved into management. It allowed me leverage my strengths while putting me in a situation where my value wasn't determined by my raw output. It sucks going to all those meetings, but it honestly made me enjoy the programming I did do considerably more than I did before. The programming I did do for the team was all prototype work with new technologies that either I or the team felt could help us out...short 2-3 hour projects whenever I could fit them into my schedule. But everything was new and I wasn't implementing things I'd done a ton of times before. In the end, I don't think this is a satisfying answer. There just aren't enough managerial jobs for all the old programmers and a lot of them can't handle the meeting workload of that kind of position. But I still suggest it on an individual basis because it's a chance to put all that experience to work programming at a higher level. Instead of linked lists you're dealing with fresh-out-of-college devs who know their big-Os by heart and can crank out code at a frightening pace. But you still need someone to ensure the overall design doesn't suck. To read over what they're producing since there will always be some crazy mis-step that they make from time to time. You still need someone who has seen a project evolve over multiple years to know which decisions will become problematic down the road. The young guys can't do that. And while it's been an adjustment to learn to find satisfaction without typing out the code myself, I've learned to enjoy the launches (both product and career) in a way that's more fulfilling than my time as a full-time coder was.
dfsegoat 10y ago
To share me / and things that keep me up at night: I am an old geek - (34 now - i guess)... I still need to work the 12 hour days in order to keep up with my day job AND to keep up with new technologies and the literature via Pluralsight, Github / HN / Coursera etc. This is what I really worry about in terms of my health and longevity: Being able to "stay on top" of the latest trends and shiney new things - and deciding what will matter in 3 years, and what is just another "fad".
- philbarr 10y ago
  This is why, at age 38, I deliberately chose to move to big-tech-company-x. As it turns out, most of my colleagues are older than me and starting to look towards their pensions. The tech is 10 years out of date, but it's so ingrained in the customer sites that it's going to stay there. There are plenty of jobs like this out there in finance, public institutions (or big companies serving them), the military (military projects can go on for decades) and so on. I get job security and a decent pension building up, they get an experienced developer in return. And in the meantime I can choose to look at shiny-new-thing without having to worry my career might depend on it. People might think 38 is a bit early to "sell out", but our industry is definitely ageist. It's not easy for non-techs to see the difference between an experienced dev who wants £100k that knows technology x and a graduate who wants £fuck-all and knows technology x.
  - treehau5 10y ago
    Until that one consultant moves in, and convinces someone higher up that you need to move to microservices and containerize all the things, and next thing you know, you are all growing mustaches, wearing suspenders and horn-rimmed glasses, taking Lyft's to work, and clamoring for the company to sponsor your Chemex habits.
    - soundwave106 10y ago
      And then the consultants leave, and the experienced developers have to fix the crummy bug-ridden code they leave behind. :) As an older developer, I think one advantage I do actually have is that I do know legacy technology. You don't want to become a developer that only knows that, but as long as I reasonably keep up with current technology and don't become a Grumpy Old Back In My Day type of old developer, that should add, not subtract. At my current job, there are actually some VB6 apps still in operation, so sometimes I am actually pulling up VB6 apps to fix or enhance to go along with the shiny new Angular 2 apps we're working on. Yes I know that I don't have the energy to pursue the move-fast-break-things life of startup style companies, but not every company is like that.
samfisher83 10y ago
The valley pays a lot so if you want to get in that club you have to play that game.The investors don't care about your family. They are interested in making money to feed their family. They found a formula and I don't think they are going to change it. Look at the Big 4: MSFT, APPL, AMNZ, FB. All their founders were on the right side of 30 except maybe bezos. It is kind of troubling the age that you are getting old seems to keep getting lower. Now 30 is old. In the future it might be 27. Node was only made like 6-7 years ago and it seems to be one of the most popular "Languages" out there. Based on my experience well thought out designs are not so admired even though people say it is. It seems like the "mantra" is just get something out of the door and we will iterate on it.
hacknat 10y ago
I have to agree. I'm getting up there too. I'm the second oldest person at my current startup and I looked around yesterday and realized that I wasn't that much more valuable than the 23-26 year olds I work with. I think I'm a damn site more technical than they are, and I also think I manage my time better than they do, but I don't think I provide that much more value to the organization. Especially given the lengths to which they will go to burn through work (i.e. long hours and weekend work). I personally think that 95% of organizations out there only need/want what the 23 year olds can provide. I'm holding out hope though that when it comes to truly valuable and technically challenging work that more mid-level to large-ish companies still have teams that value the stability and vision more mature developers can offer. I think this is my last startup for a while. I think this article hit the nail on the head. It takes a very mature and self-assured person to hire someone more qualified than they are and then hand over the commensurate freedom and responsibility along with it.
ap22213 10y ago
My experience is that younger developers take on way too much risk. It's either because they don't know how to manage risk, or they just get a rush from it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of survivorship bias that makes it seem that that is the way to go. Back in the day, it was well known that spending more time in the inception and elaboration phases would make construction much more cost effective. It was also known that developer efficiency decreased significantly after a certain threshold of hours worked. Maybe things have changed - I don't know. It sure feels like well analyzed requirements and well designed architectures yield much better products. And, more experienced developers _should be_ better at those things, on average. I wish there was more data data on the subject - I need to start reading more research coming out of the ACM SIG.
pjc50 10y ago
For me, what works is "productivity sniping": it's not about work rate, however you might want to quantify it, but about occasionally encountering problems that others find intractable and making them go away. In this case having a set of old experiences actually helps, as I can handle things that new graduates haven't seen. I half-seriously call it "full stack from the transistor up".
mmgutz 10y ago
Most startups do not work 12 hour days anymore. The days of startups offering less pay, some equity and overworking you are over. There are too many startups that need engineers. They would just move on to the next one. Retaining good engineers is harder than hiring them. I've worked 12 hours when I was a founder but it's unrealistic to expect that from your employees regardless their age.
scoates 10y ago
The jading goes much deeper than 12 hour days and "culture", in my opinion. It's "easy" to get stuff done if you have no strong feeling of responsibility for the longevity of the things you're working on, or if you've never experienced the pain that comes with this lack of planning/implementation. The first 90% is easy, but the last 10% is what makes things stable, performant, maintainable, deployable and secure (not advocating for doing this last; just saying it's easy to ignore). It's also easy to be excited about things when you['re naïve enough to] expect them to work "properly". People who've been doing this for a long time recognize that it's really rare that software Just Works™, and for that reason, things need to be architected to make room for failure. Building things without an acceptable failure mode is super fun until it fails, and then it's even worse than not doing it in the first place. Doing stuff right takes a long time and is hard. It's truly satisfying to nail it, but it's certainly not always fun/exciting.
new_hackers 10y ago
10x is greater than 2x, so yes it is possible

by daemonk 10y ago

Jean-Philipe 10y ago

> ping-pong table propaganda Thank you for enriching my vocabulary with this wonderful word!

bballer 10y ago
Uh, that's a phrase, not a word...

Swizec 10y ago

A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. No matter how little they work or how much better you are individually. But 1-on-1? Experience wins evey time. I'm not old old yet, but I do have the most experience[1] in my team. Spend the least time at work, strictly 8h/day, and am easily the top contributor by any engineering metric you can think of. Wish I could explain why or how, but the best I've been able to surmize is "I just get more done and spend less time going down wrong rabbit holes". [1] most experience with our particular stack/domain, not necessarily most general irl software engineering experience

narag 10y ago
A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. I wouldn't be so sure. It depends on the problem you're solving. Of course for routine work it would be like that.
- chrisbennet 10y ago
  And this ^^^ is what experience sounds like. A team is certainly the right tool for some situations but often the toughest routes require a single very very good climber.
- Swizec 10y ago
  By definition most work is routine. And yes, for phd-level (or almost) research work into new territories, one person teams are best.
huherto 10y ago
> A [decently managed] team of 5 will always outproduce you. No matter how little they work or how much better you are individually. Furthermore, that team will also outproduce a 25 people team.

drvdevd 10y ago

I've been into programming most of my life, but actually didn't get started professionally until my mid-to-late 20s. This gave me a unique view of said propaganda. It certainly lives everywhere including outside SV. I've been able to quickly recognize it being applied and thus desire other, better forms of compensation. I think this is a skill we should strive to teach younger programmers, because if properly applied across the entire industry, we can raise standards across the market. Just because they're willing to working 1.5-2X the hours doesn't mean they should be. Your time is valuable no matter how old you are

daemonk 10y ago
Yeah definitely. I actually work in academia (I guess I wasn't very qualified to speak about SV). But it's the same shtick everywhere. Passion has become an euphemism for soft corporate brain-washing. I am reminded of this blog article by an ad executive before his death where he raised similar points about his industry: http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-perspective/ http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-p...
- superJimmy64 10y ago
  >(You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ’em up and let ’em go.) Great link: Very, VERY insightful.
  - drvdevd 10y ago
    Agreed. What an excellent read! Highly recommended.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I always like to think of passion in the classical meaning (like "the passion of Christ") when I read crap about being passionate at work.
js8 10y ago
> Your time is valuable no matter how old you are I disagree, but maybe that would explain it, your time is actually more valuable (for you) as you grow older.

jwr 10y ago

I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. Inexperienced young programmers working 2x the hours do not necessarily produce Output That Works (I know, I've been one myself). Sure, not every company will realize that, but then again, you don't necessarily want to work for every ping-pong table company, either. Cultural fit and all that.

uola 10y ago
Honestly, even as I'm getting older, this isn't at all obvious to me. Someone with five years solid experience with web development might very well be far more effective than someone with twenty years experience of working in corners of large companies with various technologies, especially when you consider the expected salary. I think it good that people are talking about these things, but sometime it seem like people think it's a big conspiracy, rather than a factor of how the ecosystem and market looks.
- dfsegoat 10y ago
  I am with you on this - it is what causes me a lot of anxiety but what also drives me to at least know about "all the shiney things" that the new breed of engineers basically come equipped with standard.
- curun1r 10y ago
  I came to this realization a few years ago. I found that while my judgment was still improving, my output wasn't and my ability to think through problems wasn't where it used to be, especially when it came to the tiny details. So I moved into management. It allowed me leverage my strengths while putting me in a situation where my value wasn't determined by my raw output. It sucks going to all those meetings, but it honestly made me enjoy the programming I did do considerably more than I did before. The programming I did do for the team was all prototype work with new technologies that either I or the team felt could help us out...short 2-3 hour projects whenever I could fit them into my schedule. But everything was new and I wasn't implementing things I'd done a ton of times before. In the end, I don't think this is a satisfying answer. There just aren't enough managerial jobs for all the old programmers and a lot of them can't handle the meeting workload of that kind of position. But I still suggest it on an individual basis because it's a chance to put all that experience to work programming at a higher level. Instead of linked lists you're dealing with fresh-out-of-college devs who know their big-Os by heart and can crank out code at a frightening pace. But you still need someone to ensure the overall design doesn't suck. To read over what they're producing since there will always be some crazy mis-step that they make from time to time. You still need someone who has seen a project evolve over multiple years to know which decisions will become problematic down the road. The young guys can't do that. And while it's been an adjustment to learn to find satisfaction without typing out the code myself, I've learned to enjoy the launches (both product and career) in a way that's more fulfilling than my time as a full-time coder was.

dfsegoat 10y ago

To share me / and things that keep me up at night: I am an old geek - (34 now - i guess)... I still need to work the 12 hour days in order to keep up with my day job AND to keep up with new technologies and the literature via Pluralsight, Github / HN / Coursera etc. This is what I really worry about in terms of my health and longevity: Being able to "stay on top" of the latest trends and shiney new things - and deciding what will matter in 3 years, and what is just another "fad".

philbarr 10y ago
This is why, at age 38, I deliberately chose to move to big-tech-company-x. As it turns out, most of my colleagues are older than me and starting to look towards their pensions. The tech is 10 years out of date, but it's so ingrained in the customer sites that it's going to stay there. There are plenty of jobs like this out there in finance, public institutions (or big companies serving them), the military (military projects can go on for decades) and so on. I get job security and a decent pension building up, they get an experienced developer in return. And in the meantime I can choose to look at shiny-new-thing without having to worry my career might depend on it. People might think 38 is a bit early to "sell out", but our industry is definitely ageist. It's not easy for non-techs to see the difference between an experienced dev who wants £100k that knows technology x and a graduate who wants £fuck-all and knows technology x.
- treehau5 10y ago
  Until that one consultant moves in, and convinces someone higher up that you need to move to microservices and containerize all the things, and next thing you know, you are all growing mustaches, wearing suspenders and horn-rimmed glasses, taking Lyft's to work, and clamoring for the company to sponsor your Chemex habits.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    And then the consultants leave, and the experienced developers have to fix the crummy bug-ridden code they leave behind. :) As an older developer, I think one advantage I do actually have is that I do know legacy technology. You don't want to become a developer that only knows that, but as long as I reasonably keep up with current technology and don't become a Grumpy Old Back In My Day type of old developer, that should add, not subtract. At my current job, there are actually some VB6 apps still in operation, so sometimes I am actually pulling up VB6 apps to fix or enhance to go along with the shiny new Angular 2 apps we're working on. Yes I know that I don't have the energy to pursue the move-fast-break-things life of startup style companies, but not every company is like that.

samfisher83 10y ago

The valley pays a lot so if you want to get in that club you have to play that game.The investors don't care about your family. They are interested in making money to feed their family. They found a formula and I don't think they are going to change it. Look at the Big 4: MSFT, APPL, AMNZ, FB. All their founders were on the right side of 30 except maybe bezos. It is kind of troubling the age that you are getting old seems to keep getting lower. Now 30 is old. In the future it might be 27. Node was only made like 6-7 years ago and it seems to be one of the most popular "Languages" out there. Based on my experience well thought out designs are not so admired even though people say it is. It seems like the "mantra" is just get something out of the door and we will iterate on it.

hacknat 10y ago

I have to agree. I'm getting up there too. I'm the second oldest person at my current startup and I looked around yesterday and realized that I wasn't that much more valuable than the 23-26 year olds I work with. I think I'm a damn site more technical than they are, and I also think I manage my time better than they do, but I don't think I provide that much more value to the organization. Especially given the lengths to which they will go to burn through work (i.e. long hours and weekend work). I personally think that 95% of organizations out there only need/want what the 23 year olds can provide. I'm holding out hope though that when it comes to truly valuable and technically challenging work that more mid-level to large-ish companies still have teams that value the stability and vision more mature developers can offer. I think this is my last startup for a while. I think this article hit the nail on the head. It takes a very mature and self-assured person to hire someone more qualified than they are and then hand over the commensurate freedom and responsibility along with it.

ap22213 10y ago

My experience is that younger developers take on way too much risk. It's either because they don't know how to manage risk, or they just get a rush from it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of survivorship bias that makes it seem that that is the way to go. Back in the day, it was well known that spending more time in the inception and elaboration phases would make construction much more cost effective. It was also known that developer efficiency decreased significantly after a certain threshold of hours worked. Maybe things have changed - I don't know. It sure feels like well analyzed requirements and well designed architectures yield much better products. And, more experienced developers _should be_ better at those things, on average. I wish there was more data data on the subject - I need to start reading more research coming out of the ACM SIG.

pjc50 10y ago

For me, what works is "productivity sniping": it's not about work rate, however you might want to quantify it, but about occasionally encountering problems that others find intractable and making them go away. In this case having a set of old experiences actually helps, as I can handle things that new graduates haven't seen. I half-seriously call it "full stack from the transistor up".

mmgutz 10y ago

Most startups do not work 12 hour days anymore. The days of startups offering less pay, some equity and overworking you are over. There are too many startups that need engineers. They would just move on to the next one. Retaining good engineers is harder than hiring them. I've worked 12 hours when I was a founder but it's unrealistic to expect that from your employees regardless their age.

scoates 10y ago

The jading goes much deeper than 12 hour days and "culture", in my opinion. It's "easy" to get stuff done if you have no strong feeling of responsibility for the longevity of the things you're working on, or if you've never experienced the pain that comes with this lack of planning/implementation. The first 90% is easy, but the last 10% is what makes things stable, performant, maintainable, deployable and secure (not advocating for doing this last; just saying it's easy to ignore). It's also easy to be excited about things when you['re naïve enough to] expect them to work "properly". People who've been doing this for a long time recognize that it's really rare that software Just Works™, and for that reason, things need to be architected to make room for failure. Building things without an acceptable failure mode is super fun until it fails, and then it's even worse than not doing it in the first place. Doing stuff right takes a long time and is hard. It's truly satisfying to nail it, but it's certainly not always fun/exciting.

new_hackers 10y ago

10x is greater than 2x, so yes it is possible