6 ms·

What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" Would anyone think it odd for a 60-year-old physician to still be doctoring, or a 60-year-old lawyer to still pr

What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" Would anyone think it odd for a 60-year-old physician to still be doctoring, or a 60-year-old lawyer to still practice law. Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft. Corporate culture embraces the notion of management as a profession. I think programming would benefit greatly from more of a tradecraft model, where leadership is provided by the master practitioner rather than the professional manager. In the alternate universe that's how we do it. The bottom line productivity boost is awesome. I don't know if it scales, but I don't care to scale. -- 63-year-old full-stack web and machine learning programmer...living the dream

pjc50 9y ago
Fred Brooks wrote about that idea in 1975. It seems that the management side still has not learned the lesson.
- iamacynic 9y ago
  no, it only seems that way because the powerful silicon valley and finance giants are the only ones with access to the top-tier young talent. the rest of the young people out there are inexperienced and not that smart, and definitely aren't worth a six figure salary. so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.
  - to_bpr 9y ago
    You also can't get away with demanding the same work conditions or work/life balance from an older person than you can from a 21 year old CS graduate who's very eager to impress and has little other commitments to attend to. I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. You build it, you support it so keep your phone and laptop by you at all times outside of work" shtick that a lot of tech companies beat the young guy devs with.
    - defined 9y ago
      > I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. Yes, because we've fallen for that bullshit before, killed ourselves to meet the deadline, and found that the asshole manager made it artificially short to "motivate" us, and the other teams aren't even finished yet :)
      - timje1 9y ago
        Ha, this happened to me a couple of weeks ago!
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Management seems peculiarly impervious to almost all of Fred Brooks' ideas: mythical man month, second system effect and the toolsmith especially.
  - vram22 9y ago
    I've read his Mythical Man Month book, including parts of the anniversary / silver jubilee edition, but it's been a while. A couple of questions: - Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization? - What was the second system effect about? I know I can google, but interested to read your take on it first.
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      "Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?" Yep. The benefit is efficiency. However, modern SCRUM advocates simply advocate grinding away at stories. "What was the second system effect about?" The glittering new rewrite of an existing system is usually overengineered and worse. Seen it several times.
      - vram22 9y ago
        Interesting about the 2nd point, thanks. Might make for interesting reading if there are any articles about that. Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.
        vram22 9y ago
        >Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned. And at least in one case, it was: in a C database middleware product that I worked on, as the team leader. It did work earlier but had big issues of bugs, slowness, memory leaks, and maintainability. There were many reasons for that, including complete freshers put to work in it (a mistake). After me and a small new team took over, we improved it a lot and fixed all those issues. It went on to become a much more successful product, deployed somewhat widely within the company, for client projects ...
djhworld 9y ago
The management track seems unsustainable anyway if the projected career path is seen as Developer -> Manager with no alternative, unless you just keep adding layers of management.
- talmand 9y ago
  My manager is over three teams. Each team has around ten developers. We all can't be promoted to manager "if" he leaves.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Why a "Lead" will often come from another company.
cryptonector 9y ago
There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.
- justin66 9y ago
  Does anyone with 20 years experience refer to themselves as a "full-stack developer?"
  - Waterluvian 9y ago
    It's such an insufficient title when your product is a robot and the database is closer to the top of the stack than bottom. I gave up on titles a few years ago when I began to realise that so much of it feels fitting of the dot com era but not today.
  - godmodus 9y ago
    Full stack is just new age lingo, and sure why not. We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML, we say devops instead of sysadmin, we say cloud instead of vps/hosting. Times change and so does language, true to any old fart out there, and the old farts to be.
    - metaobject 9y ago
      "We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML" I thought it was the other way around. With ML taking a more statistical approach to traditional AI problems.
      - eshvk 9y ago
        Apparently the new hotness is AI. The last five years have seen titles with similar(ish) roles evolve from Data Scientist -> ML Engineer -> AI Engineer
        9y ago
tyingq 9y ago
Because age discrimination is less prevalent in doctoring, lawyering, and artisting.
colmvp 9y ago
> Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft. I still find it rare for 50 or 60-something designers to still be actively hands-on designing purely as a designer. At a certain point, a lot of the ones I know of migrate into creative direction and ideation, delegating the hands-on work to younger designers. It actually scares me a tad because I like being hands-on and generally dislike focusing my time on managerial activities, but it's always going to be hard to just limit oneself in that role as the younger generation will always be a little bit faster and more talented.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  Faster? Probably. Faster at making mistakes, certainly. More talented? Absolutely not. That's the myopia of SV's cult of youth. We're all running the same hardware, and there is very little that does not get better with experience. If you want an analogy in a different field, consider Dale Chihuly. From his wiki page: >In 1976, while Chihuly was in England, he was involved in a head-on car accident during which he flew through the windshield.[6] His face was severely cut by glass and he was blinded in his left eye. After recovering, he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hired others to do the work. Chihuly explained the change in a 2006 interview, saying "Once I stepped back, I liked the view," and pointed out that it allowed him to see the work from more perspectives and enabled him to anticipate problems faster. Chihuly describes his role as "more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor." There is no inherent reason a more managerial position involves less creativity. It can frequently enable more.
defined 9y ago
> What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" What's up is the rampant ageism in the industry - the perception that you are washed up as a "dinosaur" developer after a certain age, maybe 40 or so, and belong in management. We "dinosaurs" - we happy few - are living evidence to the contrary. -- 58 year old broad-spectrum software guy, hard at work and loving it
- kapsoft 9y ago
  61 and right there beside you brother!
norea-armozel 9y ago
Honestly, I'd rather be led by a "dinosaur" programmer than some marketing or MBA geek any day. At least then I know that my boss would go to bat for me when it's clear something is achievable within the capacities of the team or department. I've worked for too many clowns that think computers are magic boxes where you just whisper a few words into then you get a fully fleshed out platform out of it. Seriously, it should be a legal requirement that you have at least a year of experience in the profession you'll be acting as manager in.
- exclusiv 9y ago
  Or you have creative types running the show and what I like to call "programming with Photoshop" -treating programming as drag and drop.
exclusiv 9y ago
Totally agree. I'm a partner in a small business and I don't have to do any programming but I enjoy it so I dedicate at least 50%. I also run some accounts myself and provide strategy and leadership in addition to the sr. programming. I manage my team too. There is a notion that the next step should be to not do any programming and be a manager. All that does is ensure you have extra layers. I have respect as a manager because I'm still current and more skilled technically than my team. If I leave my craft my skills will decline and I wont be able to help my team accelerate in skillset. You're a better manager if you're also a subject matter expert. You should move out of low value programming but I don't think giving it up is good.

pjc50 9y ago

Fred Brooks wrote about that idea in 1975. It seems that the management side still has not learned the lesson.

iamacynic 9y ago
no, it only seems that way because the powerful silicon valley and finance giants are the only ones with access to the top-tier young talent. the rest of the young people out there are inexperienced and not that smart, and definitely aren't worth a six figure salary. so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.
- to_bpr 9y ago
  You also can't get away with demanding the same work conditions or work/life balance from an older person than you can from a 21 year old CS graduate who's very eager to impress and has little other commitments to attend to. I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. You build it, you support it so keep your phone and laptop by you at all times outside of work" shtick that a lot of tech companies beat the young guy devs with.
  - defined 9y ago
    > I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. Yes, because we've fallen for that bullshit before, killed ourselves to meet the deadline, and found that the asshole manager made it artificially short to "motivate" us, and the other teams aren't even finished yet :)
    - timje1 9y ago
      Ha, this happened to me a couple of weeks ago!
crdoconnor 9y ago
Management seems peculiarly impervious to almost all of Fred Brooks' ideas: mythical man month, second system effect and the toolsmith especially.
- vram22 9y ago
  I've read his Mythical Man Month book, including parts of the anniversary / silver jubilee edition, but it's been a while. A couple of questions: - Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization? - What was the second system effect about? I know I can google, but interested to read your take on it first.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    "Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?" Yep. The benefit is efficiency. However, modern SCRUM advocates simply advocate grinding away at stories. "What was the second system effect about?" The glittering new rewrite of an existing system is usually overengineered and worse. Seen it several times.
    - vram22 9y ago
      Interesting about the 2nd point, thanks. Might make for interesting reading if there are any articles about that. Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.
      - vram22 9y ago
        >Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned. And at least in one case, it was: in a C database middleware product that I worked on, as the team leader. It did work earlier but had big issues of bugs, slowness, memory leaks, and maintainability. There were many reasons for that, including complete freshers put to work in it (a mistake). After me and a small new team took over, we improved it a lot and fixed all those issues. It went on to become a much more successful product, deployed somewhat widely within the company, for client projects ...

djhworld 9y ago

The management track seems unsustainable anyway if the projected career path is seen as Developer -> Manager with no alternative, unless you just keep adding layers of management.

talmand 9y ago
My manager is over three teams. Each team has around ten developers. We all can't be promoted to manager "if" he leaves.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Why a "Lead" will often come from another company.

cryptonector 9y ago

There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.

justin66 9y ago
Does anyone with 20 years experience refer to themselves as a "full-stack developer?"
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  It's such an insufficient title when your product is a robot and the database is closer to the top of the stack than bottom. I gave up on titles a few years ago when I began to realise that so much of it feels fitting of the dot com era but not today.
- godmodus 9y ago
  Full stack is just new age lingo, and sure why not. We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML, we say devops instead of sysadmin, we say cloud instead of vps/hosting. Times change and so does language, true to any old fart out there, and the old farts to be.
  - metaobject 9y ago
    "We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML" I thought it was the other way around. With ML taking a more statistical approach to traditional AI problems.
    - eshvk 9y ago
      Apparently the new hotness is AI. The last five years have seen titles with similar(ish) roles evolve from Data Scientist -> ML Engineer -> AI Engineer
      - 9y ago

tyingq 9y ago

Because age discrimination is less prevalent in doctoring, lawyering, and artisting.

colmvp 9y ago

> Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft. I still find it rare for 50 or 60-something designers to still be actively hands-on designing purely as a designer. At a certain point, a lot of the ones I know of migrate into creative direction and ideation, delegating the hands-on work to younger designers. It actually scares me a tad because I like being hands-on and generally dislike focusing my time on managerial activities, but it's always going to be hard to just limit oneself in that role as the younger generation will always be a little bit faster and more talented.

Baeocystin 9y ago
Faster? Probably. Faster at making mistakes, certainly. More talented? Absolutely not. That's the myopia of SV's cult of youth. We're all running the same hardware, and there is very little that does not get better with experience. If you want an analogy in a different field, consider Dale Chihuly. From his wiki page: >In 1976, while Chihuly was in England, he was involved in a head-on car accident during which he flew through the windshield.[6] His face was severely cut by glass and he was blinded in his left eye. After recovering, he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hired others to do the work. Chihuly explained the change in a 2006 interview, saying "Once I stepped back, I liked the view," and pointed out that it allowed him to see the work from more perspectives and enabled him to anticipate problems faster. Chihuly describes his role as "more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor." There is no inherent reason a more managerial position involves less creativity. It can frequently enable more.

defined 9y ago

> What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" What's up is the rampant ageism in the industry - the perception that you are washed up as a "dinosaur" developer after a certain age, maybe 40 or so, and belong in management. We "dinosaurs" - we happy few - are living evidence to the contrary. -- 58 year old broad-spectrum software guy, hard at work and loving it

kapsoft 9y ago
61 and right there beside you brother!

norea-armozel 9y ago

Honestly, I'd rather be led by a "dinosaur" programmer than some marketing or MBA geek any day. At least then I know that my boss would go to bat for me when it's clear something is achievable within the capacities of the team or department. I've worked for too many clowns that think computers are magic boxes where you just whisper a few words into then you get a fully fleshed out platform out of it. Seriously, it should be a legal requirement that you have at least a year of experience in the profession you'll be acting as manager in.

exclusiv 9y ago
Or you have creative types running the show and what I like to call "programming with Photoshop" -treating programming as drag and drop.

exclusiv 9y ago

Totally agree. I'm a partner in a small business and I don't have to do any programming but I enjoy it so I dedicate at least 50%. I also run some accounts myself and provide strategy and leadership in addition to the sr. programming. I manage my team too. There is a notion that the next step should be to not do any programming and be a manager. All that does is ensure you have extra layers. I have respect as a manager because I'm still current and more skilled technically than my team. If I leave my craft my skills will decline and I wont be able to help my team accelerate in skillset. You're a better manager if you're also a subject matter expert. You should move out of low value programming but I don't think giving it up is good.