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>I have no doubt that skills and abilities decrease with age. I wonder if this will just be true for your generation. Because of computers and the programming

>I have no doubt that skills and abilities decrease with age. I wonder if this will just be true for your generation. Because of computers and the programming industry only really taking off when you were already a few years into your career. I can imagine that someone who started their career with programming early and just continues with it might just keep widening the gap between them and newcomers. Which might only change if there is another shakeup in our lifetimes. My boss from my previous job is in his mid forties and extremely good technically. Intimidatingly so. I imagine I can become the same if I keep going at it the way I do now. I'm 31.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
beat 10y ago
At my second serious job in the late '90s, my manager was the programmer who wrote the linker for Cray unix when he was there. Great programmer. Now I'm the old guy who intimidates they young'ns. Being a good programmer has very little to do with following current trends in tools. Tools can be learned, especially if they don't require a fundamental shift in thinking. I've lived through a project of watching lifer COBOL programmers involved in transitioning their systems to Java. Some simply couldn't learn Java at all, it was such an alien way of thinking. Some of them quit or retired, some became analysts for the project, because they understood the business that was encoded in those bazillion lines of twenty year old COBOL. Now I'm starting to see a generation of early Java legacy apps rewritten in Node or whatever. What goes around...