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This is generally true. It's a combination of many things, from brain "degradation", ageism, simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ),

This is generally true. It's a combination of many things, from brain "degradation", ageism, simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ), other more important interests like having a real life and when you really mute all the marketing BS, your delusions and wishful thinking, the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the majority of people on those jobs. I'm a few years from 40 and not having experience or interest in large organizations, I don't know what to do. Programming is cool, but I always found it to be a tool to get somewhere, and that somewhere hasn't happened and I don't even know what it is or looks like. But either way, always have a plan B and don't forget about it.

commandlinefan 7y ago
> the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life The thing is, it doesn't have to be and, until relatively recently, honestly wasn't. It's a shitty job and a sad life because we have open offices, ticket-tracking systems and daily standups. There was a time when programming was exciting and rewarding.
- randrews 7y ago
  I would add code reviews to that. The advent of those was when it really stopped being fun for me, because it's really hard to keep that from turning into "your boss nitpicking every line you write."
  - oriolid 7y ago
    In my opinion this is much, much better than trying to decipher what the heck that one co-worker pushed to production and how exactly it broke things. Of course there are ways to smuggle rubbish through code review, but it's still better than no reviews.
    - randrews 7y ago
      Both have problems. The best system is one where a passing review means "I feel comfortable maintaining this;" too often a passing review means "this is how I would have written it."
      - Silhouette 7y ago
        IMHO, review processes should concentrate on identifying problems, not solutions.
      - wes-k 7y ago
        Agreed. Few things to consider: - linters to help move away from code style comments - Peer code reviews (if possible) - inform your team/boss of bike shedding - use a tool like reviewable.io where comments can be marked as blocking or not. I’ll often comment on preferences and block on issues.
        randrews 7y ago
        Yep. I've worked on great teams that did all those things. And not-so-great teams that didn't. The latter is really draining.
      - Stratoscope 7y ago
        I have suffered under far too many "this is how I would have written it" reviews. It can be really demoralizing to write perfectly good, working, readable, performant, well-tested code only to have it rejected and have to rewrite it because the reviewer wishes you had used a different C++ feature. I tried something like your "I feel comfortable maintaining this" approach recently when I was the reviewer. We have an internal geodata visualization tool that I've done some work on lately, and a talented C++ developer added a cool and useful new feature to the JavaScript front end. He asked me to review it and said, "I'm sure you will find a lot of things I should change! This is my first real JavaScript project other than some hobby stuff." And he was right. There was a lot of stuff I would have done differently. There was a mix of jQuery and document.getElementById, a fair amount of repeated code, var instead of const or let, and so on. Our "house style" for reviews would have been for me to comment on every single one of these things line by line and expect him to change them all to my satisfaction. It would then require a second review pass to clear up misunderstandings, and a third to see if it all ended up OK. Instead I told him: "Your new feature is awesome! You're right, there are a lot of nitpicky things I would change in the code to bring it up to more modern JS style, and I'm glad you asked about that. But I didn't find anything that looks broken or dangerous. And the feature works, right? I could spend half a day writing comments explaining everything I would do differently, and that would keep you busy for another half day fixing it up. But I know you have more important things to work on right now, so maybe we can try something different. Go ahead and submit the code as is so people can start using it. When I get a little time I will just go ahead and make the changes I'm thinking of. I'll add review comments on my own changes and send it to you for review so you can see what I changed and why. That will avoid a lot of back-and-forth. I think it will save us both a lot of time and be a more pleasant experience too." Needless to say, the developer liked this idea. And his manager was within earshot when we discussed it and thanked me for thinking of this approach. I still haven't made that update, and this reminds me to do it sometime soon. But the code still works, people are using it productively, it has not failed once, and who really cares if there are some minor imperfections in the code style? None of our code is perfect!
  - blub 7y ago
    Code review is one of those things where the culture around reviewing and the experience of the reviewers makes all the difference. A code review where the boss reviews code is pathological. When experienced peers do the review it can be brilliant. In fact I would only trust a team of very competent seniors not to need code review. Even then, getting another opinion on your code can be worth it.
    - atq2119 7y ago
      Everybody needs code review. Though the way I scan the code during review does change by how much I know and respect the author on a technical level. That correlates with but is not identical to their formal seniority.
  - ambicapter 7y ago
    I don't think are any good work techniques when you're surrounded by assholes.
- wpietri 7y ago
  For me daily stand-ups are a great tool for closely collaborating with colleagues. I get that managers have often turned them into top-down status report meetings. (And that almost anything "Agile" has similarly, despite initial aims, been turned into an instrument of control.) But my best working environments have been in strong teams, and I'd hate to see the baby get thrown out with the bathwater.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  I don't have a problem with standups. I actually like having ticket tracking systems (how else are you supposed to know what is high priority to work on?). But, open offices are objectively terrible. Research shows it, people here complain about it all the time, and yet companies keep building them. Where I'm at, the floor is divided in such a way that teams sitting together can sometimes have their own little "bull pen" area that's a little bit separated from other teams (if only by a whiteboard wall). This helps, and I like working in an area with just my team, but I would prefer real walls.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    I hate standups with a fucking passion. All a standup to me is an interruption 30-45 minutes into the day which causes me to lose an hour or more of time every single day. I basically just fart around with things that don't need much focus until the standup happens. The worst part is that I suggested instead of standups we just send what we we would have said in the standup via slack. That lasted 3 days. The reason no one liked it? "I don't read what other people put into slack". Yeah, ex-fucking-actly. It's literally not helpful because you don't actually need to know what someone is working on that day, and if you do it's because you're also working on it and you can communicate that privately.
    - szatkus 7y ago
      If it takes 30-45 minutes something is wrong. I hated standups as well until I worked with right people.
      - celticmusic 7y ago
        you misunderstood, the standup happens 30-45 minutes into the workday.
        pmiller2 7y ago
        Show up 5 minutes before standup, or 5 minutes into it, then. Problem solved. ;) On a more serious note, read email, get a drink, and plan your day. You’ll be talking about the plan in less than an hour, anyway.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  The thing is, it doesn't have to be and, until relatively recently, honestly wasn't. Indeed. It's almost as if it's a bad idea to take people working in a field where creativity and careful thought are fundamental and a wide variety of experience with different but related ideas is often helpful and then try to turn them into interchangeable commodities with the whole process dumbed down to the level of the least competent developer or manager in the team. For my own career, escaping that sort of foolishness was the single biggest benefit when I made the jump to freelance work and even more so when I first became a founder. As soon as you go independent, you're no longer dealing with a subordinate employer-employee relationship, where everything you do is subject to the whimsy and caprice of whoever pays your salary. Instead, you're dealing with a business to business client-service relationship, where your objective is to provide the service the client needs. How you choose to solve whatever problem they have in terms of technology or process is much more down to your own professional judgement. If you do follow entrepreneurial route, you become effectively both client and service provider in that sense, and it's what you learn from your market research and customer relations that guides your direction in often even more general terms. There was a time when programming was exciting and rewarding. IMHO, it still is, as long as you find an environment where using fun things to get useful results is the emphasis. Mind-numbing corporate box-ticking is soul-destroying in any field. We're privileged to work in a field where all we really need to do useful work is often a laptop, an Internet connection, and a willingness to use our brains, and where that work can still be valuable enough to others to make a very nice living off it, and where there is no shortage of potential customers. Now, there's nothing wrong with being a competent professional who turns up and writes software during office hours and then goes home to enjoy life with their family/friends/hobbies like anyone else, and maybe for those people the structured corporate environment is helpful. And of course going independent has other challenges that aren't just about technical skills, and those are not for everyone. But for anyone who wants more than an office job and doesn't mind taking on a broader skill set to operate independently, I don't understand why they would continue to work in the kind of toxic employment environment we are discussing today. I suspect that in many cases it is simply ignorance (meant literally, not derogatively) of the possible alternatives and the paths to transition to them. Incidentally, as a convenient side effect of working as an independent professional or through your own hopefully more enlightened business, the sort of ageist nonsense that motivated today's discussion also largely disappears. For a lot of clients outside the tech bubble, a 25-year-old in trendy clothes spouting the latest buzzwords is much less impressive than a 45-year-old who immediately gives off a competent, professional vibe. And if you're the 45-year-old who did keep up with developments and has had an extra 20 years of honing their skills, your rates can reflect your greater capability and productivity, which is much harder to achieve if you're still someone's employee at that point.
- antisemiotic 7y ago
  >open offices Noise-cancelling headphones are mankind's greatest weapon in the hopeless war against braindead management practices.
  - PedroBatista 7y ago
    Do you guys now understand why I've said it's a sad life? We are so "important" to mankind, yet the best we can do is to buy Noise-cancelling headphones.
    - cgh 7y ago
      Fair point, but to be honest nearly all modern work is borderline dystopic, regardless of how "important" it's deemed by society. If you think being a programmer in BigOrg, Inc. sucks, then take a summer and work on a construction site or with a landscaping crew. Trust me, you'll yearn for that loud, open-plan office soon enough. Modern society would quickly implode without plumbers, yet actually being a plumber and crawling around under houses in rat shit is not very fun.
  - jackstraw14 7y ago
    This doesn't work for me. It seems depressing as hell that we have to put in earplugs and pipe distracting media into our brains just to make work tolerable. How is cutting off one of our senses from our environment a solution?
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Surely evidence of the declining mind share of unions.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  As long as we exempt engineering teams from OKRs I can tolerate it
- p0nce 7y ago
  None of this is true if you work for yourself.
pm90 7y ago
Literally everywhere outside of Silicon Valley you can get great jobs in Software that move at a reasonable pace. SV is very different from the rest of US
- adventured 7y ago
  Not to mention the great overall quality of life that a regular 9 to 5 job as a software developer provides in the rest of the country outside of SF/NY/SEA/LA/BO. Be a median software developer, pair up with a spouse making the national full-time median, now you've got a $160,000 household income (which doesn't sound special in SV). Married that's $115k-$125k in take-home pay in most of the country. $160,000 family income vs a $350,000 house. That's the kind of ratio that tilts life a lot further in your favor in many regards.
  - pm90 7y ago
    Absolutely. I admire the idealism in Silicon Valley 100%, and personally enjoy working here. But it’s important to point out that a) Most people who come here don’t become millionaires and b) You don’t need to be a millionaire to have an amazing quality of life in other parts of the US.
  - matwood 7y ago
    You're absolutely correct, and it's something so many people do not realize.
axaxs 7y ago
I've been the opposite - preferring to work at big, rather boring places. The work itself is not as exciting or fast paced, but things are stable. And I've not seen any signs of age-ism. The two guys on my team pumping out the most code are both 40+, I think 50+ actually. Sharp as tacks. And it doesn't have to be old tech. We're using a lot of Go and React now, for example.
hellisothers 7y ago
I’ve admittedly only had 4 jobs in 20 years but I wouldn’t describe any of them like this. Maybe this happens more at scrappy startups and I’ve worked at more established companies?
curioussavage 7y ago
With all that experience you must have forgotten about or never held a truly crappy job. Try working in a call center or retail. Any job where I can get paid to code is better than 90% of the jobs out there.
burlesona 7y ago
I’m sorry but if you think programming is not a “shitty job and a sad life.” While individuals certainly experience really bad situations in every walk of life, programming is an exceptionally valuable and versatile way to make a living, and offers a level of freedom and economic mobility that most people in most fields could only dream of.
- PedroBatista 7y ago
  While I'm aware and fully agree with your University of Phoenix pitch, please try to listen and understand that's only true given the right context ( both economic, social, time, etc. ) Most people sit at an office in front of a computer for at least 8 hours a day, some of them are developers. Most "problems" they "solve" are very distant from the "Changing the World and give meaning to your life, one PHP line at a time". It's a great gig, but a sad life when you'll look back on your deathbed.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - blankcheque 7y ago
    I'm not sure where you're working but where I work, being a developer is awesome. Fresh, healthy, high quality, free food catered for 3 meals a day? Check. Best healthcare possible provided at no cost? Check. Stocked kitchen with all kinds of snacks, high end coffee, kombucha etc with ability to make requests? Check. Freedom to come in when I want and leave when I want? Check. Work remotely when I want? Check. Any equipment I want at any cost? Check. Top of market pay for size of company? Check. Beautiful office with natural sunlight, plants everywhere, and fresh air? Check. Autonomy and creativity in my role? Check. Top percentile talent as coworkers who are genuinely amazing collaborators, interesting people and great to work with? Check. Like with all professions, there are depressing jobs and great jobs. If you're a dev working at a paper mill in the midwest with draconian dinosaurs as management, yeah it might not be the best gig. But if you work at a company that values software and understands the leverage of great developers, then I can't think of a job that's more cushy and fulfilling.
ErikAugust 7y ago
"The actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the majority of people on those jobs." I'd love to give you a tour of what people do for work, and then you can personally decide how bad programming is as a profession.
- PedroBatista 7y ago
  Funnily enough, there's a good chance I know more about it than you. I just don't use other people's tremendous shitty jobs to glorify mine.
  - ErikAugust 7y ago
    This is obviously a wild assumption, but you seem to have made up your mind. Good day.
bachmeier 7y ago
Just want to nitpick on a couple of these: > brain "degradation" At 40? If you're suffering from loss of mental capabilities to the point that it affects your performance at work at 40, you have medical issues that need immediate attention. > simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ) I've seen this stated many times, but nothing is forcing anyone to offer a particular salary or demand a particular salary.
- PedroBatista 7y ago
  Executive and working memory decline is a real thing that happens with age, I didn't say I'm demented to a point where I suck at my job, but I definitely felt a slight decrease from my 20's to my 30's. > I've seen this stated many times, but nothing is forcing anyone to offer a particular salary or demand a particular salary. I didn't think bosses& hiring managers trying to pay the minimum and get the maximum was a contentious point. Our industry is still made of young people who prefer younger people to do their work, for both economic ( many times short sighted ) and social reasons.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    > Executive and working memory decline is a real thing that happens with age I thought that wasn't really supported by anything significant. Life, health getting in a way is not a decline of mental abilities.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Not sure that I agree on the first point. In my 20s, I could easily work 12 hour days, keep tons of complex state in my head, and almost never walked into a room and wondered why I went there (both literally and in the programming metaphorical equivalent). In my 40s, much of that has changed. I'm beat mentally after a 6-7 hour day of coding. I can only keep smaller portions of the system in my head easily. It's possible that I was blissfully aware of how shallowly I understood things or how ineffective I was in hours 7-12 of a workday in my 20s (and both of those no doubt have shreds of truth in them), but it seems way more likely that I am noticing a genuine difference in mental ability over the intervening two decades. None of that seems medically abnormal to me.
edgarvaldes 7y ago
>the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting What is a "professional setting" in this context?
- PedroBatista 7y ago
  Sitting in front of a computer for years, trying to fix mundane problems, bugs, implement very important and urgent features that are very useless and not really urgent. You know, being the brick mason of yet another cathedral of delusions and failure as most business are. Which is life and I don't really have a problem with that. But we are all human and after a decade of this shit, it gets hollow and meaningless.
  - ericd 7y ago
    Why not try working on your own thing? Sounds like you're burned out on corporate work.
    - PedroBatista 7y ago
      I did but got lost in my own mind and the solo business is obviously a lot harder ( if you're just a grunt programmer). Without maturity, a strong social network and discipline every solo venture will end up in isolation and depression. But I still try the usual side projects that get started and not finished like everybody else. :) Right now, I just wish I would find something 80% business and 20% tech with a feedback loop comparable to a plumber ( work for a day or 2, when it's done its really DONE. Move to next job )
      - ericd 7y ago
        Doesn’t have to be solo :-) But yeah, I hear you, I did a solo thing for 5 years, probably wouldn’t do it solo for that long again.
      - therealx 7y ago
        Oh, its you again. I don't mean that in a mean way, but your comments do stick out as being burned out/not happy. I'm happy you opened up a little as to how you feel. If you want something that's 80% business 20% tech, I can high recommend getting into "high end" consulting. "High end" just meaning rich people, their houses, and a small smattering of businesses that they themselves have a high earning to effort %. I don't mean writing code, I mean doing networking/server work/maybe some desktop stuff. I know that doesn't sound glamorous, but you get to make good money (really good money), most jobs are DONE when you're done, and it's generally very low stress. (learn and understand VLAN's and that level of networking and you're already in demand for a lot of people) Most of the job is learning to setup/meet expectations, know how to talk to those kinds of people, and other business end skills. You'll also never age out - these kinds of people have long ago learned to identify other markers and often are older themselves. I did this for years and it fit all the things you say you'd like and it left me with plenty of time to write code on the side (or not, the time is there to do what you love.)
Benjammer 7y ago
>the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life Compared to what? Have you ever worked manual labor, retail, food service industry, etc?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jm__87 7y ago
> the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the majority of people on those jobs. Oh man, I cannot relate to this at all. I feel very lucky to be a software developer - there are far more boring jobs out there, that pay far less, with less flexible hours.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life The thing is, it doesn't have to be and, until relatively recently, honestly wasn't. It's a shitty job and a sad life because we have open offices, ticket-tracking systems and daily standups. There was a time when programming was exciting and rewarding.

randrews 7y ago
I would add code reviews to that. The advent of those was when it really stopped being fun for me, because it's really hard to keep that from turning into "your boss nitpicking every line you write."
- oriolid 7y ago
  In my opinion this is much, much better than trying to decipher what the heck that one co-worker pushed to production and how exactly it broke things. Of course there are ways to smuggle rubbish through code review, but it's still better than no reviews.
  - randrews 7y ago
    Both have problems. The best system is one where a passing review means "I feel comfortable maintaining this;" too often a passing review means "this is how I would have written it."
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      IMHO, review processes should concentrate on identifying problems, not solutions.
    - wes-k 7y ago
      Agreed. Few things to consider: - linters to help move away from code style comments - Peer code reviews (if possible) - inform your team/boss of bike shedding - use a tool like reviewable.io where comments can be marked as blocking or not. I’ll often comment on preferences and block on issues.
      - randrews 7y ago
        Yep. I've worked on great teams that did all those things. And not-so-great teams that didn't. The latter is really draining.
    - Stratoscope 7y ago
      I have suffered under far too many "this is how I would have written it" reviews. It can be really demoralizing to write perfectly good, working, readable, performant, well-tested code only to have it rejected and have to rewrite it because the reviewer wishes you had used a different C++ feature. I tried something like your "I feel comfortable maintaining this" approach recently when I was the reviewer. We have an internal geodata visualization tool that I've done some work on lately, and a talented C++ developer added a cool and useful new feature to the JavaScript front end. He asked me to review it and said, "I'm sure you will find a lot of things I should change! This is my first real JavaScript project other than some hobby stuff." And he was right. There was a lot of stuff I would have done differently. There was a mix of jQuery and document.getElementById, a fair amount of repeated code, var instead of const or let, and so on. Our "house style" for reviews would have been for me to comment on every single one of these things line by line and expect him to change them all to my satisfaction. It would then require a second review pass to clear up misunderstandings, and a third to see if it all ended up OK. Instead I told him: "Your new feature is awesome! You're right, there are a lot of nitpicky things I would change in the code to bring it up to more modern JS style, and I'm glad you asked about that. But I didn't find anything that looks broken or dangerous. And the feature works, right? I could spend half a day writing comments explaining everything I would do differently, and that would keep you busy for another half day fixing it up. But I know you have more important things to work on right now, so maybe we can try something different. Go ahead and submit the code as is so people can start using it. When I get a little time I will just go ahead and make the changes I'm thinking of. I'll add review comments on my own changes and send it to you for review so you can see what I changed and why. That will avoid a lot of back-and-forth. I think it will save us both a lot of time and be a more pleasant experience too." Needless to say, the developer liked this idea. And his manager was within earshot when we discussed it and thanked me for thinking of this approach. I still haven't made that update, and this reminds me to do it sometime soon. But the code still works, people are using it productively, it has not failed once, and who really cares if there are some minor imperfections in the code style? None of our code is perfect!
- blub 7y ago
  Code review is one of those things where the culture around reviewing and the experience of the reviewers makes all the difference. A code review where the boss reviews code is pathological. When experienced peers do the review it can be brilliant. In fact I would only trust a team of very competent seniors not to need code review. Even then, getting another opinion on your code can be worth it.
  - atq2119 7y ago
    Everybody needs code review. Though the way I scan the code during review does change by how much I know and respect the author on a technical level. That correlates with but is not identical to their formal seniority.
- ambicapter 7y ago
  I don't think are any good work techniques when you're surrounded by assholes.
wpietri 7y ago
For me daily stand-ups are a great tool for closely collaborating with colleagues. I get that managers have often turned them into top-down status report meetings. (And that almost anything "Agile" has similarly, despite initial aims, been turned into an instrument of control.) But my best working environments have been in strong teams, and I'd hate to see the baby get thrown out with the bathwater.
pmiller2 7y ago
I don't have a problem with standups. I actually like having ticket tracking systems (how else are you supposed to know what is high priority to work on?). But, open offices are objectively terrible. Research shows it, people here complain about it all the time, and yet companies keep building them. Where I'm at, the floor is divided in such a way that teams sitting together can sometimes have their own little "bull pen" area that's a little bit separated from other teams (if only by a whiteboard wall). This helps, and I like working in an area with just my team, but I would prefer real walls.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  I hate standups with a fucking passion. All a standup to me is an interruption 30-45 minutes into the day which causes me to lose an hour or more of time every single day. I basically just fart around with things that don't need much focus until the standup happens. The worst part is that I suggested instead of standups we just send what we we would have said in the standup via slack. That lasted 3 days. The reason no one liked it? "I don't read what other people put into slack". Yeah, ex-fucking-actly. It's literally not helpful because you don't actually need to know what someone is working on that day, and if you do it's because you're also working on it and you can communicate that privately.
  - szatkus 7y ago
    If it takes 30-45 minutes something is wrong. I hated standups as well until I worked with right people.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      you misunderstood, the standup happens 30-45 minutes into the workday.
      - pmiller2 7y ago
        Show up 5 minutes before standup, or 5 minutes into it, then. Problem solved. ;) On a more serious note, read email, get a drink, and plan your day. You’ll be talking about the plan in less than an hour, anyway.
Silhouette 7y ago
The thing is, it doesn't have to be and, until relatively recently, honestly wasn't. Indeed. It's almost as if it's a bad idea to take people working in a field where creativity and careful thought are fundamental and a wide variety of experience with different but related ideas is often helpful and then try to turn them into interchangeable commodities with the whole process dumbed down to the level of the least competent developer or manager in the team. For my own career, escaping that sort of foolishness was the single biggest benefit when I made the jump to freelance work and even more so when I first became a founder. As soon as you go independent, you're no longer dealing with a subordinate employer-employee relationship, where everything you do is subject to the whimsy and caprice of whoever pays your salary. Instead, you're dealing with a business to business client-service relationship, where your objective is to provide the service the client needs. How you choose to solve whatever problem they have in terms of technology or process is much more down to your own professional judgement. If you do follow entrepreneurial route, you become effectively both client and service provider in that sense, and it's what you learn from your market research and customer relations that guides your direction in often even more general terms. There was a time when programming was exciting and rewarding. IMHO, it still is, as long as you find an environment where using fun things to get useful results is the emphasis. Mind-numbing corporate box-ticking is soul-destroying in any field. We're privileged to work in a field where all we really need to do useful work is often a laptop, an Internet connection, and a willingness to use our brains, and where that work can still be valuable enough to others to make a very nice living off it, and where there is no shortage of potential customers. Now, there's nothing wrong with being a competent professional who turns up and writes software during office hours and then goes home to enjoy life with their family/friends/hobbies like anyone else, and maybe for those people the structured corporate environment is helpful. And of course going independent has other challenges that aren't just about technical skills, and those are not for everyone. But for anyone who wants more than an office job and doesn't mind taking on a broader skill set to operate independently, I don't understand why they would continue to work in the kind of toxic employment environment we are discussing today. I suspect that in many cases it is simply ignorance (meant literally, not derogatively) of the possible alternatives and the paths to transition to them. Incidentally, as a convenient side effect of working as an independent professional or through your own hopefully more enlightened business, the sort of ageist nonsense that motivated today's discussion also largely disappears. For a lot of clients outside the tech bubble, a 25-year-old in trendy clothes spouting the latest buzzwords is much less impressive than a 45-year-old who immediately gives off a competent, professional vibe. And if you're the 45-year-old who did keep up with developments and has had an extra 20 years of honing their skills, your rates can reflect your greater capability and productivity, which is much harder to achieve if you're still someone's employee at that point.
antisemiotic 7y ago
>open offices Noise-cancelling headphones are mankind's greatest weapon in the hopeless war against braindead management practices.
- PedroBatista 7y ago
  Do you guys now understand why I've said it's a sad life? We are so "important" to mankind, yet the best we can do is to buy Noise-cancelling headphones.
  - cgh 7y ago
    Fair point, but to be honest nearly all modern work is borderline dystopic, regardless of how "important" it's deemed by society. If you think being a programmer in BigOrg, Inc. sucks, then take a summer and work on a construction site or with a landscaping crew. Trust me, you'll yearn for that loud, open-plan office soon enough. Modern society would quickly implode without plumbers, yet actually being a plumber and crawling around under houses in rat shit is not very fun.
- jackstraw14 7y ago
  This doesn't work for me. It seems depressing as hell that we have to put in earplugs and pipe distracting media into our brains just to make work tolerable. How is cutting off one of our senses from our environment a solution?
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Surely evidence of the declining mind share of unions.
rolltiide 7y ago
As long as we exempt engineering teams from OKRs I can tolerate it
p0nce 7y ago
None of this is true if you work for yourself.

pm90 7y ago

Literally everywhere outside of Silicon Valley you can get great jobs in Software that move at a reasonable pace. SV is very different from the rest of US

adventured 7y ago
Not to mention the great overall quality of life that a regular 9 to 5 job as a software developer provides in the rest of the country outside of SF/NY/SEA/LA/BO. Be a median software developer, pair up with a spouse making the national full-time median, now you've got a $160,000 household income (which doesn't sound special in SV). Married that's $115k-$125k in take-home pay in most of the country. $160,000 family income vs a $350,000 house. That's the kind of ratio that tilts life a lot further in your favor in many regards.
- pm90 7y ago
  Absolutely. I admire the idealism in Silicon Valley 100%, and personally enjoy working here. But it’s important to point out that a) Most people who come here don’t become millionaires and b) You don’t need to be a millionaire to have an amazing quality of life in other parts of the US.
- matwood 7y ago
  You're absolutely correct, and it's something so many people do not realize.

axaxs 7y ago

I've been the opposite - preferring to work at big, rather boring places. The work itself is not as exciting or fast paced, but things are stable. And I've not seen any signs of age-ism. The two guys on my team pumping out the most code are both 40+, I think 50+ actually. Sharp as tacks. And it doesn't have to be old tech. We're using a lot of Go and React now, for example.

hellisothers 7y ago

I’ve admittedly only had 4 jobs in 20 years but I wouldn’t describe any of them like this. Maybe this happens more at scrappy startups and I’ve worked at more established companies?

curioussavage 7y ago

With all that experience you must have forgotten about or never held a truly crappy job. Try working in a call center or retail. Any job where I can get paid to code is better than 90% of the jobs out there.

burlesona 7y ago

I’m sorry but if you think programming is not a “shitty job and a sad life.” While individuals certainly experience really bad situations in every walk of life, programming is an exceptionally valuable and versatile way to make a living, and offers a level of freedom and economic mobility that most people in most fields could only dream of.

PedroBatista 7y ago
While I'm aware and fully agree with your University of Phoenix pitch, please try to listen and understand that's only true given the right context ( both economic, social, time, etc. ) Most people sit at an office in front of a computer for at least 8 hours a day, some of them are developers. Most "problems" they "solve" are very distant from the "Changing the World and give meaning to your life, one PHP line at a time". It's a great gig, but a sad life when you'll look back on your deathbed.
- deleted 7y ago
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- blankcheque 7y ago
  I'm not sure where you're working but where I work, being a developer is awesome. Fresh, healthy, high quality, free food catered for 3 meals a day? Check. Best healthcare possible provided at no cost? Check. Stocked kitchen with all kinds of snacks, high end coffee, kombucha etc with ability to make requests? Check. Freedom to come in when I want and leave when I want? Check. Work remotely when I want? Check. Any equipment I want at any cost? Check. Top of market pay for size of company? Check. Beautiful office with natural sunlight, plants everywhere, and fresh air? Check. Autonomy and creativity in my role? Check. Top percentile talent as coworkers who are genuinely amazing collaborators, interesting people and great to work with? Check. Like with all professions, there are depressing jobs and great jobs. If you're a dev working at a paper mill in the midwest with draconian dinosaurs as management, yeah it might not be the best gig. But if you work at a company that values software and understands the leverage of great developers, then I can't think of a job that's more cushy and fulfilling.

ErikAugust 7y ago

"The actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the majority of people on those jobs." I'd love to give you a tour of what people do for work, and then you can personally decide how bad programming is as a profession.

PedroBatista 7y ago
Funnily enough, there's a good chance I know more about it than you. I just don't use other people's tremendous shitty jobs to glorify mine.
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  This is obviously a wild assumption, but you seem to have made up your mind. Good day.

bachmeier 7y ago

Just want to nitpick on a couple of these: > brain "degradation" At 40? If you're suffering from loss of mental capabilities to the point that it affects your performance at work at 40, you have medical issues that need immediate attention. > simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ) I've seen this stated many times, but nothing is forcing anyone to offer a particular salary or demand a particular salary.

PedroBatista 7y ago
Executive and working memory decline is a real thing that happens with age, I didn't say I'm demented to a point where I suck at my job, but I definitely felt a slight decrease from my 20's to my 30's. > I've seen this stated many times, but nothing is forcing anyone to offer a particular salary or demand a particular salary. I didn't think bosses& hiring managers trying to pay the minimum and get the maximum was a contentious point. Our industry is still made of young people who prefer younger people to do their work, for both economic ( many times short sighted ) and social reasons.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > Executive and working memory decline is a real thing that happens with age I thought that wasn't really supported by anything significant. Life, health getting in a way is not a decline of mental abilities.
sokoloff 7y ago
Not sure that I agree on the first point. In my 20s, I could easily work 12 hour days, keep tons of complex state in my head, and almost never walked into a room and wondered why I went there (both literally and in the programming metaphorical equivalent). In my 40s, much of that has changed. I'm beat mentally after a 6-7 hour day of coding. I can only keep smaller portions of the system in my head easily. It's possible that I was blissfully aware of how shallowly I understood things or how ineffective I was in hours 7-12 of a workday in my 20s (and both of those no doubt have shreds of truth in them), but it seems way more likely that I am noticing a genuine difference in mental ability over the intervening two decades. None of that seems medically abnormal to me.

edgarvaldes 7y ago

>the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting What is a "professional setting" in this context?

PedroBatista 7y ago
Sitting in front of a computer for years, trying to fix mundane problems, bugs, implement very important and urgent features that are very useless and not really urgent. You know, being the brick mason of yet another cathedral of delusions and failure as most business are. Which is life and I don't really have a problem with that. But we are all human and after a decade of this shit, it gets hollow and meaningless.
- ericd 7y ago
  Why not try working on your own thing? Sounds like you're burned out on corporate work.
  - PedroBatista 7y ago
    I did but got lost in my own mind and the solo business is obviously a lot harder ( if you're just a grunt programmer). Without maturity, a strong social network and discipline every solo venture will end up in isolation and depression. But I still try the usual side projects that get started and not finished like everybody else. :) Right now, I just wish I would find something 80% business and 20% tech with a feedback loop comparable to a plumber ( work for a day or 2, when it's done its really DONE. Move to next job )
    - ericd 7y ago
      Doesn’t have to be solo :-) But yeah, I hear you, I did a solo thing for 5 years, probably wouldn’t do it solo for that long again.
    - therealx 7y ago
      Oh, its you again. I don't mean that in a mean way, but your comments do stick out as being burned out/not happy. I'm happy you opened up a little as to how you feel. If you want something that's 80% business 20% tech, I can high recommend getting into "high end" consulting. "High end" just meaning rich people, their houses, and a small smattering of businesses that they themselves have a high earning to effort %. I don't mean writing code, I mean doing networking/server work/maybe some desktop stuff. I know that doesn't sound glamorous, but you get to make good money (really good money), most jobs are DONE when you're done, and it's generally very low stress. (learn and understand VLAN's and that level of networking and you're already in demand for a lot of people) Most of the job is learning to setup/meet expectations, know how to talk to those kinds of people, and other business end skills. You'll also never age out - these kinds of people have long ago learned to identify other markers and often are older themselves. I did this for years and it fit all the things you say you'd like and it left me with plenty of time to write code on the side (or not, the time is there to do what you love.)

Benjammer 7y ago

>the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life Compared to what? Have you ever worked manual labor, retail, food service industry, etc?

deleted 7y ago

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jm__87 7y ago

> the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the majority of people on those jobs. Oh man, I cannot relate to this at all. I feel very lucky to be a software developer - there are far more boring jobs out there, that pay far less, with less flexible hours.