3 ms·

I'm 47, but my kids are reminding me 50 is coming soon! I'm working as a web engineer — not a manager or even team lead — working remotely from the Midwest for

I'm 47, but my kids are reminding me 50 is coming soon! I'm working as a web engineer — not a manager or even team lead — working remotely from the Midwest for a coastal company, and I'm pretty happy with it. All I can say is keep learning, be friendly, and delight in the energy of all you young people. I am not entirely sure why I have been hired, or even whether it was a good idea for my employer. So maybe stay humble too? Maybe being remote prevents me from pinching the cheeks of adorable devs 25 years my junior. My advice: Don't pinch cheeks. Turns out Millennials don't like it. No matter how adorable those little non-grey-haired hackers are. Anecdotally, the older I get, the less ambitious I get about my own career and the more interested in just helping out and doing things that make a difference. My self-discipline has become marginally better over the years, and my coding ability marginally worse. Definitely trending towards grandparent. Things I especially like: interviewing, having a real-world impact, learning things, using cool new tools, helping out, justice. Things I dislike: politics, jockeying for position. Also, the whole "I've forgotten more than you've ever known about this field" feels true. But honestly thank goodness you didn't have to learn it, because a lot of it is irrelevant now.

effie 8y ago
Could you share some examples of the things you learned but then became irrelevant? I wonder if we could find some pattern to help people avoid learning modern stuff that will have the same fate.
- neolefty 8y ago
  Off the top of my head, things I never implement or use anymore: * socket listeners * line drawing * explicit memory management * old APIs and libraries * Perl * Assembly And things I rarely use: * Semaphores & other threading primitives * XML * C/C++ Now, knowing these sometimes helps, but the amount of time I spent on them probably doesn't justify the benefit aside from the fact that it was necessary at the time. And somebody is doing these now — I just find I don't need to, as it's always handled somewhere below the abstraction layers where I work. An equally interesting list would be the things I use now that didn't exist when I graduated from college in 1996.
  - thekingofh 8y ago
    The gaming industry is still heavily invested in C++, for better or worse.
- scarface74 8y ago
  All technology becomes irrelevant after awhile. You’ve got to keep learning the latest frameworks because your younger competition will.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  There's a good course on Pluralsight about learning management strategy. It basically boils down to considering the expected half-life of the knowledge and then apportioning time based on that and stratifying the learning. I can't recall the specifics but it's something like 10% deep-diving on long-lived fundamentals 25% going deep on your core stack you will be using for the foreseeable future The rest on the what's in front of you + what's coming next I really like it.

effie 8y ago

Could you share some examples of the things you learned but then became irrelevant? I wonder if we could find some pattern to help people avoid learning modern stuff that will have the same fate.

neolefty 8y ago
Off the top of my head, things I never implement or use anymore: * socket listeners * line drawing * explicit memory management * old APIs and libraries * Perl * Assembly And things I rarely use: * Semaphores & other threading primitives * XML * C/C++ Now, knowing these sometimes helps, but the amount of time I spent on them probably doesn't justify the benefit aside from the fact that it was necessary at the time. And somebody is doing these now — I just find I don't need to, as it's always handled somewhere below the abstraction layers where I work. An equally interesting list would be the things I use now that didn't exist when I graduated from college in 1996.
- thekingofh 8y ago
  The gaming industry is still heavily invested in C++, for better or worse.
scarface74 8y ago
All technology becomes irrelevant after awhile. You’ve got to keep learning the latest frameworks because your younger competition will.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
There's a good course on Pluralsight about learning management strategy. It basically boils down to considering the expected half-life of the knowledge and then apportioning time based on that and stratifying the learning. I can't recall the specifics but it's something like 10% deep-diving on long-lived fundamentals 25% going deep on your core stack you will be using for the foreseeable future The rest on the what's in front of you + what's coming next I really like it.