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I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to hav

by C4stor 7y ago

I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The older guys, they seem like they had the time to correctly learn the unix network tools, the jvm debugging ones, the memory inspection ones. I've known older devs for which I have the utmost respect because I felt like they can just debug the shit out of anything happening on a computer, with tools I don't even know of but have been there for decades. And here I am, needing to google how use tcpdump or jstack, and scrambling to correctly understand the result. I agree that new tech is always stacking, but I feel like it's pretty damn hard to catch up on the in fact still very relevant and important old one, because it's no longer taught, no longer a meetup topic, no longer hype. And the new one is really easy to learn when you realize that it's 90% rehashing of old concepts (Observables are all the hype in javascript ? Well, great, I've learnt that pattern 15 years ago...) Admittedly, I have no clue if the management realizes that ! But the impact of this knowledge, from what I observed, is really huge on productivity, and is especially a boon when the production is on fire or generally when tricky stuff happens. So, respect for the elders, and please come and teach in conferences and meetups, we need more wisdom and less hype !

banachtarski 7y ago
Well, TCP is a hot mess that should and will be phased out in favor of more congestion friendly protocols.
- option_greek 7y ago
  We barely could get IPV6 to get adopted. Replacing the whole TCP ? Most probably not. The successor to TCP if it ever gets adopted, will look more like TCP than a new protocol.
  - g00s3_caLL_x2 7y ago
    Agreed. Entire industries are based off the distinction of the stack and it's interoperability(sp?).
- f00zz 7y ago
  What are those alternatives?
  - supahfly_remix 7y ago
    QUIC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) is one alternative.
    - convolvatron 7y ago
      doesn't quic use bbr, a cc scheme developed by and supported in tcp?
wrs 7y ago
Amen to all that. OA> Herein is the source of the problem. The more irrelevant experience a candidate has, the more lopsided the utility/value equation becomes… No, the source of the problem is the idea that 10 years of “C++ experience” is “irrelevant” to a project using Rails, as if development experience is somehow locked to the language you happened to do the development in. Being a valuable senior developer is about 10% what technology you know and about 90% how good you are at working in a team to solve a business problem with a machine, and those fundamental skills haven’t changed much since 1960. As you point out, the more experience you have, the more you realize that all these “different” technologies are mostly the same wine in different bottles. Or, as I like to say, “it’s all just software”.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I worry the real problem is not that managers are looking for someone who can do the job, but someone they can exploit. The gleeful exuberance over 'new' things is something you can use against a younger programmer. The older one who knows the vintages doesn't get as excited, because it's really not that exciting. You haven't discovered Shangri La. We've kinda already done 90% of this before, just maybe not all at the same time. But there's good exciting and bad exciting, and it takes a while to learn the difference (I work with a bunch of people who apparently have not). What's bad excitement look like? War rooms, for one. But they are the same dopamine hit as Stockholm Syndrome and so the battlescarred have bonded while the rest of us are doing everything we can to stay out of war rooms (I haven't been in one in well over a year). I've started calling these people BASE jumpers, because they're adrenaline junkies. There are not so many older BASE jumpers (I hope it's not because they're all dead). I think you learn to value other things besides adrenaline. Like teamwork.
  - polskibus 7y ago
    Maybe the problem is the big tech producers that introduce new technologies over and over, that don't raise productivity but create churn, force software rewrites, etc. Tech history looked at from 40yr perspective, really seems like reinventing wheels over and over. I'm not sure if there is another industry with so much churn yet with a lot of rehashing of old ideas.
mistahenry 7y ago
I’m always mirin’ my current boss when he opens midnight commander and figures out the answer to his question by looking at the hex of the binary. I needed to change a string in a compiled binary and as I pulled the project down to change and compile from sources, he suggested we just patch the binary and we did in 1 minute with hexedit. I really don’t buy that skills don’t transfer. Where this is actually the case must be people getting too locked into abstractions and never really understanding the essence
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  "Mirin is a common staple used in Japanese cooking. It's a type of rice wine, similar to sake, but with a lower alcohol and higher sugar content." Unlikely this is what you meant. Admiring?
  - thr0w4w4yy 7y ago
    It is 100% a colloquialism..
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Meaning what?
      - bumbledraven 7y ago
        Urban Dictionary is useful for looking up suggested meanings of colloquialisms. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mirin https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mirin
        hombre_fatal 7y ago
        What's funny is that it's already getting dated. I remember it was ubiquitous online in the forums I frequented in 2010 just like Urban Dictionary's graph shows. And that is already a decade ago (yikes)!
cwyers 7y ago
The article mentions this: > I know you love programming because you like technology, so this may go against your very nature, but no one says you’ve got to jump every time some snot-nosed kid invents a new way to run byte-code. You have invested a lot of time and energy mastering the technology you use, and your experience differentiates you. Money follows scarcity, and snow-birding on an older technology, if you can stomach it, may just be the way to protect your earning potential. The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology. It is highly likely that you will still be able to earn some decent coin in the technology you know and love even after a few decades.
mattferderer 7y ago
I had a recent conversation with someone who was into electronics & programming 40+ years ago as a youth. He has had successful careers in other non-related fields. He recently was messing around with a Raspberry Pi & remarked how little things have changed & how easy it was to jump pack in. I strongly believe an employer is very short sighted if they are more concerned in a specific framework than knowledge as a whole. I agree, learning a framework doesn't take much time. They all borrow their patterns & ideas. If your needs are urgent for a person to hit the ground running on a specific framework you should probably hire a contractor. If you want an employee you should care more about people & project skills, plus overall programming/IT knowledge.
ito03j 7y ago
That’s basically how I find work. I’ve been in Unix admin since the 90s. Do I know the latest coding pattern some adjunct professor is teaching after copying it from a math book into code, like the college grads I often encounter? No. Do they know much about operating at scale? How USE their tools? They know what ideas are important to computer science. They often don’t know how to make anything work that isn’t an insecure mess. I think that’s the important take here: I program less these days because I’m teaching people how to make shit that’s more complex than their reduced to a few talking points homework assignments.
asdfman123 7y ago
Yeah, you hear all these horror stories about how developers have a "shelf life." In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. Look at any hobby -- say, guitar playing. The difference between someone who's been doing it for 4 years and someone who's been doing it 20 years is ridiculous. They're so much better. I feel software dev isn't that different. The only problem is if you're older you do need to follow new technologies. Older devs I've talked to who were pushed out of the field are the types who worked on, say, mainframe technology well into the mid-aughts and never thought about learning anything new. As long as you get off the sinking ship of technologies that are obviously waning (and you should have at least a decade of warning in advance, I think), I don't think it's honestly that hard to stay current. You don't have to follow every fad, but make sure people will continue to use your main programming language. Also, startups discriminate on age because they need people that can work until 2 AM and drink their Kool Aide. But there's a lot of stable, non-startup jobs out there. People who have never left the scene probably think of it as death, but there's actually some really nice enterprise shops out there with great developers.
- BuckRogers 7y ago
  I went "full software" back at the age of 36. I did this because I saw the writing on the wall for systems/devops and being a half-developer, essentially from writing scripts to full OOP. I put a ton of time and thought, and effort into the change. It wasn't easy to complete the transition and get hired, but I settled on C#. Chosen because C# and Java are similar enough (my only formal education in programming was in Java), and I could move between the two, if I had to. I also saw MS driving the future of .Net really hard, even after about 10 years before it looked like there was no future and MS was going back to unmanaged code. I also wanted as stable of a development platform as possible, an attempt at avoiding churn with all the kiddos in the web space. I'm still working fulltime as a C# dev and enjoy it. But if anything ever happens, I'll jump ship to the Java space. Both the city I live in and less-populated state that I'm from have copious amount of C# and Java jobs available, so I'm not on something so cutting edge that I have to live somewhere specific. It's my opinion that the best balance for most software projects was nailed with Java (and then it's descendent, C#). There's a reason it's so popular and they're not bad reasons. My dream job is to come full circle and be "the IT guy" at a small company, handling software and systems as a one-man operation. That can be done in the MS space, as less expertise is necessary in general on the systems side to manage the entire stack. Even less so with Azure. Will I be pushed out? I'm sure. I'm expecting less of a shelf life than the old hats because so many more people are raising their children to be ready for this field. Also, outsourcing/visa migration was fully implemented to diminish the industry for workers, since about 2000. The industry that was supposed to be the next buoy of the American middle class has been successfully undermined by American hypercapitalism. Greatly reducing prospects and the future for even my generation, the golden generation of children that grew up on a Commodore. A special time of astute technologists raised when we had personal computers at home, but before iOS collapsed the barrier of entry and nullified the mystery & effort required to get to entertainment.
II2II 7y ago
> I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM? Still rocking it 20 years after. Java may not be my favorite language, but I respect how the language has both progressed and maintained its heritage. It allows the developer to build upon their skills rather than relearning nearly identical skills every time a new technology comes out. The problem is that this 70 year old industry still behaves in very immature ways. While this may be acceptable when it comes down to attitudes towards technology, the unfortunate side-effect seems to be the adoption of similar attitudes towards people. Every time someone says something like, "young people are more in tune with the current state of technology," or, "old people are more capable because they have more experience," they are legitimizing prejudice. That's true even when the statement is being made in an attempt to combat prejudice since it is applying generalizations to individuals. Granted, it is very difficult to shed generalizations. Just look at my comment about the immaturity of the industry. That isn't universally true. Some companies are going to have a younger workforce, some older, some heterogeneous. Some companies are going to have old people working with old technologies, some are going to have young people working with young technologies, but some are going to have the young with old technologies and vice versa. Yet the generalization comes about because of how we frame the industry, which is one where the new replaces the old. Which brings me back to why I respect Java: it looks both towards the future and back at the past. It is language of growth, rather than a language of revolution. Perhaps this inanimate technology has something to teach us about how we regard people: we should be encouraging growth and advancement rather than treating people as disposable.
scarface74 7y ago
Yes. But as the article said, there is a diminishing amount of value after every year of true experience after a number of years. I would say around 10. I definitely don’t believe in the “10x Engineer” (individual contributor) - yes they do exist but are so rare they aren’t worth talking about. I do believe in being a force multiplier as a team lead/mentor.
- wrs 7y ago
  On the one hand, sure, percentage-wise you learn less in year 20 than in year 10, because you already know a lot more in year 19. But that is no more true of this field than any other field. Is a doctor, architect, civil engineer, or auto mechanic with 20 years experience more valuable than one with 10 years experience? Heck yes.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    20 years ago,much of what I used today didn't existed there was no AWS, no C# (but C++ was close enough I guess), mobile where you had to worry about semi-connected networks and syncing, etc. There is no part of the human body that exists today that didn't exist 20 years ago.
    - wrs 7y ago
      All of which is just details, which are much less important than the fundamental skills of building systems with whatever people and tools are available. (And I'm sorry, are you implying no significant changes have occurred in the tools and practice of medicine in 20 years?)
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Thinking that moving from on prem to AWS for instance is now you end up with “AWS Architect” who were old school net ops guys who only know how to do a “lift and shift” and end up costing clients more. Because they pattern matched thought AWS was just an implementation detail and they could just set up everything like they would on prem.
bobthepanda 7y ago
This is the bottom section of TFA: > You’ve got a cash cow, milk that sucker! > I know you love programming because you like technology, so this may go against your very nature, but no one says you’ve got to jump every time some snot-nosed kid invents a new way to run byte-code. You have invested a lot of time and energy mastering the technology you use, and your experience differentiates you. Money follows scarcity, and snow-birding on an older technology, if you can stomach it, may just be the way to protect your earning potential. The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology. It is highly likely that you will still be able to earn some decent coin in the technology you know and love even after a few decades.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
The javascript ecosystem however... The entire stack literally (for the actual meaning of literally) change completely every year. Frameworks, language, package manager, libraries, etc.
- rat9988 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure you have misused the word literally.
  - jeffrallen 7y ago
    Try to update a one year old npm project and you will find that literally 75% of the code in node_modules changes, and also that the app no longer works.
    - CalRobert 7y ago
      And then it was yarn. And then npm again.
- ohaideredevs 7y ago
  Ecosystem, sure, but I am still using the JavaScript I learned x years ago when I need to see how something is implemented in Angular or React under the hood, etc.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Sure. But learning a new framework is like 100th on the list of hard parts of being an engineer. Its new incantations but ultimately the loop of solving business problems with automation is precisely the same. 100% of my team had basically zero C++ experience before joining. Our application is developed entirely in C++. I didn't care one bit because learning the programming idioms is so trivial compared to the actually hard stuff.
irq11 7y ago
It’s practically a trope that every time this subject comes up, the top-rated comment is a skeptical response...from a junior developer. As someone who actually has worked as a programmer on the far side of 40, let me assure you that yes, older programmers have value. Your perceptions are not wrong. But that said, the article is right. The people who do the hiring and firing do not care about what you care about. As the article noted clearly, the marginal benefit of an older engineer has to exceed the marginal costs. And if we’re being honest, the fact that a graybeard can use tcpdump without reading the docs carries little marginal benefit. Guess what, kid? You’ll figure it out, and you’ll do it quickly enough that the total cost of your learning won’t really compare to the cost of hiring me. That’s why you see lots of anecdotes about the value of older engineers, but lots of articles from older engineers who know that the discrimination is real. And this is coming from someone who has managed to “stay relevant” a lot longer than most software devs.
- C4stor 7y ago
  I litterally wrote that I don't how management values what I value. I also never wrote that the article is wrong, I wrote that I didn't find it convincing. I'm simply observing that after more than ten years developing and learning the craft, I still find myself not able to correctly know the old tools, and instead I merely have an idea of some that exist, and I'm sometimes able to google the correct one. As so, I'm stating that when I see a graybeard with actual knowledge of fundamentals that I still totally lack, well, I respect that, and I _hope_ that he's not unemployable because if it is the case, I fear that our industry is doomed to produced always more buggy software due to a lack of basic understanding. And I think than faced with no evidence from the article or you, it's well within my rights to be skeptical. So, thank you for the unwarranted condescendance.
  - irq11 7y ago
    I honestly wasn’t trying to be condescending to you. I even said, right at the very beginning of my comment, that you’re right about many of your observations. My word choice may have been poor in some places, but overall I defend the content. You’re (self-admittedly) missing some of the life and business experience that comes with being an older programmer, and then expressing skepticism about direct advice communicated by older programmers. This is also so common as to be a meme: Person A: “I experienced $something_rare at work” Person B: “I have never experienced such things. I am skeptical of your claims.” So sure, you can call it whatever you like - skepticsm, disagreement or debate - but when people tell you about their experiences, and then you reject those experiences because you don’t have “evidence”...well, eventually you’re just confirming your own biases. Again, it’s not that you’re wrong - I actually agree with your perceptions of older devs. I just think you’re missing critical life experiences that connect your observations with the arguments being made in the article.
max_effort 7y ago
I worked a consulting gig with a 60yo who had just learned Objective-C so he could do mobile work. This was in 2013. I guess if it’s a seed round company with a 22yo founder they might have some bias. But the rest of the world absolutely needs devs of any age.
bad_user 7y ago
> Observables are all the hype in javascript ? Well, great, I've learnt that pattern 15 years ago... Well, the listener/observer pattern is used to explain observables in order to make them familiar, but no, it's not the same thing. Observables are streams and you work with them the via composition of streams. When viewed from that high level, the underlying protocol (the observer) becomes irrelevant and in fact, if you're often finding yourself working with that protocol, you're doing it wrong. People familiar with functional programming will be very familiar with this style, because composition is very natural to an FP developer and the composition of all kinds of streams is in the repertoire of FP developers. But I've seen plenty of colleagues, who are otherwise very capable people, really struggle with the concepts involved. The mentality shift from the imperative programming that people have been taught, to describing actions via function composition and then doing evaluation "at the end of the world" is a mind fuck. Interestingly, functional programming has been with us for some time, being older than Java. However people are not interested in actual functional programming and more recently there's this trend to classify junk as FP, just because you've got a shitty API that takes functions (often doing side effects) as arguments to other functions, but that's not FP. So going back to Observables, as a piece of advice, don't mention that in an interview ;-)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- C4stor 7y ago
  Well, it was my obvservation reading typescript code (never wrote a line in this language) with a background from java and then c# and then scala. The observables part felt really easy even without knowing the language syntax, but I suppose that the past 4 years of scala made me instantly translate the code in functional fashion and it was all smooth. On the other, while it's wrapped differently, the whole idea of "this object will start emitting events, and we will be having functions as callback on them defined in various objects" really feels a lot like good old java observables/listeners, even if it's applied with a different paradigm. The stream part really feels like an implementation detail to me, it's just less boilerplate than before. Then again, it was just an anecdote based on reading code in a language I don't use ^^ javascript and typescript aren't even mentioned on my resume, for good reasons, so I should be safe in interviews !
alasdair_ 7y ago
Seeing someone fire up wireshark, sniff some traffic and solve a complex production issue in five minutes by looking at the raw packets never gets old.
phektus 7y ago
> Admittedly, I have no clue if the management realises that ! Well, that's the key thing in many places: it's management that decides whether to hire and how much to offer, not you :) The first instinct would be to put 'resources' that costs little into a project, and that usually means people with less experience that requires less pay and are easier to drag around. Imagine the difficulty they will be having trying to grok your line of reasoning for respecting and going after these older devs.

by C4stor 7y ago

banachtarski 7y ago

Well, TCP is a hot mess that should and will be phased out in favor of more congestion friendly protocols.

option_greek 7y ago
We barely could get IPV6 to get adopted. Replacing the whole TCP ? Most probably not. The successor to TCP if it ever gets adopted, will look more like TCP than a new protocol.
- g00s3_caLL_x2 7y ago
  Agreed. Entire industries are based off the distinction of the stack and it's interoperability(sp?).
f00zz 7y ago
What are those alternatives?
- supahfly_remix 7y ago
  QUIC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) is one alternative.
  - convolvatron 7y ago
    doesn't quic use bbr, a cc scheme developed by and supported in tcp?

wrs 7y ago

Amen to all that. OA> Herein is the source of the problem. The more irrelevant experience a candidate has, the more lopsided the utility/value equation becomes… No, the source of the problem is the idea that 10 years of “C++ experience” is “irrelevant” to a project using Rails, as if development experience is somehow locked to the language you happened to do the development in. Being a valuable senior developer is about 10% what technology you know and about 90% how good you are at working in a team to solve a business problem with a machine, and those fundamental skills haven’t changed much since 1960. As you point out, the more experience you have, the more you realize that all these “different” technologies are mostly the same wine in different bottles. Or, as I like to say, “it’s all just software”.

hinkley 7y ago
I worry the real problem is not that managers are looking for someone who can do the job, but someone they can exploit. The gleeful exuberance over 'new' things is something you can use against a younger programmer. The older one who knows the vintages doesn't get as excited, because it's really not that exciting. You haven't discovered Shangri La. We've kinda already done 90% of this before, just maybe not all at the same time. But there's good exciting and bad exciting, and it takes a while to learn the difference (I work with a bunch of people who apparently have not). What's bad excitement look like? War rooms, for one. But they are the same dopamine hit as Stockholm Syndrome and so the battlescarred have bonded while the rest of us are doing everything we can to stay out of war rooms (I haven't been in one in well over a year). I've started calling these people BASE jumpers, because they're adrenaline junkies. There are not so many older BASE jumpers (I hope it's not because they're all dead). I think you learn to value other things besides adrenaline. Like teamwork.
- polskibus 7y ago
  Maybe the problem is the big tech producers that introduce new technologies over and over, that don't raise productivity but create churn, force software rewrites, etc. Tech history looked at from 40yr perspective, really seems like reinventing wheels over and over. I'm not sure if there is another industry with so much churn yet with a lot of rehashing of old ideas.

mistahenry 7y ago

I’m always mirin’ my current boss when he opens midnight commander and figures out the answer to his question by looking at the hex of the binary. I needed to change a string in a compiled binary and as I pulled the project down to change and compile from sources, he suggested we just patch the binary and we did in 1 minute with hexedit. I really don’t buy that skills don’t transfer. Where this is actually the case must be people getting too locked into abstractions and never really understanding the essence

mixmastamyk 7y ago
"Mirin is a common staple used in Japanese cooking. It's a type of rice wine, similar to sake, but with a lower alcohol and higher sugar content." Unlikely this is what you meant. Admiring?
- thr0w4w4yy 7y ago
  It is 100% a colloquialism..
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Meaning what?
    - bumbledraven 7y ago
      Urban Dictionary is useful for looking up suggested meanings of colloquialisms. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mirin https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mirin
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        What's funny is that it's already getting dated. I remember it was ubiquitous online in the forums I frequented in 2010 just like Urban Dictionary's graph shows. And that is already a decade ago (yikes)!

cwyers 7y ago

The article mentions this: > I know you love programming because you like technology, so this may go against your very nature, but no one says you’ve got to jump every time some snot-nosed kid invents a new way to run byte-code. You have invested a lot of time and energy mastering the technology you use, and your experience differentiates you. Money follows scarcity, and snow-birding on an older technology, if you can stomach it, may just be the way to protect your earning potential. The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology. It is highly likely that you will still be able to earn some decent coin in the technology you know and love even after a few decades.

mattferderer 7y ago

I had a recent conversation with someone who was into electronics & programming 40+ years ago as a youth. He has had successful careers in other non-related fields. He recently was messing around with a Raspberry Pi & remarked how little things have changed & how easy it was to jump pack in. I strongly believe an employer is very short sighted if they are more concerned in a specific framework than knowledge as a whole. I agree, learning a framework doesn't take much time. They all borrow their patterns & ideas. If your needs are urgent for a person to hit the ground running on a specific framework you should probably hire a contractor. If you want an employee you should care more about people & project skills, plus overall programming/IT knowledge.

ito03j 7y ago

That’s basically how I find work. I’ve been in Unix admin since the 90s. Do I know the latest coding pattern some adjunct professor is teaching after copying it from a math book into code, like the college grads I often encounter? No. Do they know much about operating at scale? How USE their tools? They know what ideas are important to computer science. They often don’t know how to make anything work that isn’t an insecure mess. I think that’s the important take here: I program less these days because I’m teaching people how to make shit that’s more complex than their reduced to a few talking points homework assignments.

asdfman123 7y ago

Yeah, you hear all these horror stories about how developers have a "shelf life." In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself. Look at any hobby -- say, guitar playing. The difference between someone who's been doing it for 4 years and someone who's been doing it 20 years is ridiculous. They're so much better. I feel software dev isn't that different. The only problem is if you're older you do need to follow new technologies. Older devs I've talked to who were pushed out of the field are the types who worked on, say, mainframe technology well into the mid-aughts and never thought about learning anything new. As long as you get off the sinking ship of technologies that are obviously waning (and you should have at least a decade of warning in advance, I think), I don't think it's honestly that hard to stay current. You don't have to follow every fad, but make sure people will continue to use your main programming language. Also, startups discriminate on age because they need people that can work until 2 AM and drink their Kool Aide. But there's a lot of stable, non-startup jobs out there. People who have never left the scene probably think of it as death, but there's actually some really nice enterprise shops out there with great developers.

BuckRogers 7y ago
I went "full software" back at the age of 36. I did this because I saw the writing on the wall for systems/devops and being a half-developer, essentially from writing scripts to full OOP. I put a ton of time and thought, and effort into the change. It wasn't easy to complete the transition and get hired, but I settled on C#. Chosen because C# and Java are similar enough (my only formal education in programming was in Java), and I could move between the two, if I had to. I also saw MS driving the future of .Net really hard, even after about 10 years before it looked like there was no future and MS was going back to unmanaged code. I also wanted as stable of a development platform as possible, an attempt at avoiding churn with all the kiddos in the web space. I'm still working fulltime as a C# dev and enjoy it. But if anything ever happens, I'll jump ship to the Java space. Both the city I live in and less-populated state that I'm from have copious amount of C# and Java jobs available, so I'm not on something so cutting edge that I have to live somewhere specific. It's my opinion that the best balance for most software projects was nailed with Java (and then it's descendent, C#). There's a reason it's so popular and they're not bad reasons. My dream job is to come full circle and be "the IT guy" at a small company, handling software and systems as a one-man operation. That can be done in the MS space, as less expertise is necessary in general on the systems side to manage the entire stack. Even less so with Azure. Will I be pushed out? I'm sure. I'm expecting less of a shelf life than the old hats because so many more people are raising their children to be ready for this field. Also, outsourcing/visa migration was fully implemented to diminish the industry for workers, since about 2000. The industry that was supposed to be the next buoy of the American middle class has been successfully undermined by American hypercapitalism. Greatly reducing prospects and the future for even my generation, the golden generation of children that grew up on a Commodore. A special time of astute technologists raised when we had personal computers at home, but before iOS collapsed the barrier of entry and nullified the mystery & effort required to get to entertainment.

II2II 7y ago

> I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM? Still rocking it 20 years after. Java may not be my favorite language, but I respect how the language has both progressed and maintained its heritage. It allows the developer to build upon their skills rather than relearning nearly identical skills every time a new technology comes out. The problem is that this 70 year old industry still behaves in very immature ways. While this may be acceptable when it comes down to attitudes towards technology, the unfortunate side-effect seems to be the adoption of similar attitudes towards people. Every time someone says something like, "young people are more in tune with the current state of technology," or, "old people are more capable because they have more experience," they are legitimizing prejudice. That's true even when the statement is being made in an attempt to combat prejudice since it is applying generalizations to individuals. Granted, it is very difficult to shed generalizations. Just look at my comment about the immaturity of the industry. That isn't universally true. Some companies are going to have a younger workforce, some older, some heterogeneous. Some companies are going to have old people working with old technologies, some are going to have young people working with young technologies, but some are going to have the young with old technologies and vice versa. Yet the generalization comes about because of how we frame the industry, which is one where the new replaces the old. Which brings me back to why I respect Java: it looks both towards the future and back at the past. It is language of growth, rather than a language of revolution. Perhaps this inanimate technology has something to teach us about how we regard people: we should be encouraging growth and advancement rather than treating people as disposable.

scarface74 7y ago

Yes. But as the article said, there is a diminishing amount of value after every year of true experience after a number of years. I would say around 10. I definitely don’t believe in the “10x Engineer” (individual contributor) - yes they do exist but are so rare they aren’t worth talking about. I do believe in being a force multiplier as a team lead/mentor.

wrs 7y ago
On the one hand, sure, percentage-wise you learn less in year 20 than in year 10, because you already know a lot more in year 19. But that is no more true of this field than any other field. Is a doctor, architect, civil engineer, or auto mechanic with 20 years experience more valuable than one with 10 years experience? Heck yes.
- scarface74 7y ago
  20 years ago,much of what I used today didn't existed there was no AWS, no C# (but C++ was close enough I guess), mobile where you had to worry about semi-connected networks and syncing, etc. There is no part of the human body that exists today that didn't exist 20 years ago.
  - wrs 7y ago
    All of which is just details, which are much less important than the fundamental skills of building systems with whatever people and tools are available. (And I'm sorry, are you implying no significant changes have occurred in the tools and practice of medicine in 20 years?)
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Thinking that moving from on prem to AWS for instance is now you end up with “AWS Architect” who were old school net ops guys who only know how to do a “lift and shift” and end up costing clients more. Because they pattern matched thought AWS was just an implementation detail and they could just set up everything like they would on prem.

bobthepanda 7y ago

This is the bottom section of TFA: > You’ve got a cash cow, milk that sucker! > I know you love programming because you like technology, so this may go against your very nature, but no one says you’ve got to jump every time some snot-nosed kid invents a new way to run byte-code. You have invested a lot of time and energy mastering the technology you use, and your experience differentiates you. Money follows scarcity, and snow-birding on an older technology, if you can stomach it, may just be the way to protect your earning potential. The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology. It is highly likely that you will still be able to earn some decent coin in the technology you know and love even after a few decades.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

The javascript ecosystem however... The entire stack literally (for the actual meaning of literally) change completely every year. Frameworks, language, package manager, libraries, etc.

rat9988 7y ago
I'm pretty sure you have misused the word literally.
- jeffrallen 7y ago
  Try to update a one year old npm project and you will find that literally 75% of the code in node_modules changes, and also that the app no longer works.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    And then it was yarn. And then npm again.
ohaideredevs 7y ago
Ecosystem, sure, but I am still using the JavaScript I learned x years ago when I need to see how something is implemented in Angular or React under the hood, etc.
UncleMeat 7y ago
Sure. But learning a new framework is like 100th on the list of hard parts of being an engineer. Its new incantations but ultimately the loop of solving business problems with automation is precisely the same. 100% of my team had basically zero C++ experience before joining. Our application is developed entirely in C++. I didn't care one bit because learning the programming idioms is so trivial compared to the actually hard stuff.

irq11 7y ago

It’s practically a trope that every time this subject comes up, the top-rated comment is a skeptical response...from a junior developer. As someone who actually has worked as a programmer on the far side of 40, let me assure you that yes, older programmers have value. Your perceptions are not wrong. But that said, the article is right. The people who do the hiring and firing do not care about what you care about. As the article noted clearly, the marginal benefit of an older engineer has to exceed the marginal costs. And if we’re being honest, the fact that a graybeard can use tcpdump without reading the docs carries little marginal benefit. Guess what, kid? You’ll figure it out, and you’ll do it quickly enough that the total cost of your learning won’t really compare to the cost of hiring me. That’s why you see lots of anecdotes about the value of older engineers, but lots of articles from older engineers who know that the discrimination is real. And this is coming from someone who has managed to “stay relevant” a lot longer than most software devs.

C4stor 7y ago
I litterally wrote that I don't how management values what I value. I also never wrote that the article is wrong, I wrote that I didn't find it convincing. I'm simply observing that after more than ten years developing and learning the craft, I still find myself not able to correctly know the old tools, and instead I merely have an idea of some that exist, and I'm sometimes able to google the correct one. As so, I'm stating that when I see a graybeard with actual knowledge of fundamentals that I still totally lack, well, I respect that, and I _hope_ that he's not unemployable because if it is the case, I fear that our industry is doomed to produced always more buggy software due to a lack of basic understanding. And I think than faced with no evidence from the article or you, it's well within my rights to be skeptical. So, thank you for the unwarranted condescendance.
- irq11 7y ago
  I honestly wasn’t trying to be condescending to you. I even said, right at the very beginning of my comment, that you’re right about many of your observations. My word choice may have been poor in some places, but overall I defend the content. You’re (self-admittedly) missing some of the life and business experience that comes with being an older programmer, and then expressing skepticism about direct advice communicated by older programmers. This is also so common as to be a meme: Person A: “I experienced $something_rare at work” Person B: “I have never experienced such things. I am skeptical of your claims.” So sure, you can call it whatever you like - skepticsm, disagreement or debate - but when people tell you about their experiences, and then you reject those experiences because you don’t have “evidence”...well, eventually you’re just confirming your own biases. Again, it’s not that you’re wrong - I actually agree with your perceptions of older devs. I just think you’re missing critical life experiences that connect your observations with the arguments being made in the article.

max_effort 7y ago

I worked a consulting gig with a 60yo who had just learned Objective-C so he could do mobile work. This was in 2013. I guess if it’s a seed round company with a 22yo founder they might have some bias. But the rest of the world absolutely needs devs of any age.

bad_user 7y ago

> Observables are all the hype in javascript ? Well, great, I've learnt that pattern 15 years ago... Well, the listener/observer pattern is used to explain observables in order to make them familiar, but no, it's not the same thing. Observables are streams and you work with them the via composition of streams. When viewed from that high level, the underlying protocol (the observer) becomes irrelevant and in fact, if you're often finding yourself working with that protocol, you're doing it wrong. People familiar with functional programming will be very familiar with this style, because composition is very natural to an FP developer and the composition of all kinds of streams is in the repertoire of FP developers. But I've seen plenty of colleagues, who are otherwise very capable people, really struggle with the concepts involved. The mentality shift from the imperative programming that people have been taught, to describing actions via function composition and then doing evaluation "at the end of the world" is a mind fuck. Interestingly, functional programming has been with us for some time, being older than Java. However people are not interested in actual functional programming and more recently there's this trend to classify junk as FP, just because you've got a shitty API that takes functions (often doing side effects) as arguments to other functions, but that's not FP. So going back to Observables, as a piece of advice, don't mention that in an interview ;-)

deleted 7y ago
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C4stor 7y ago
Well, it was my obvservation reading typescript code (never wrote a line in this language) with a background from java and then c# and then scala. The observables part felt really easy even without knowing the language syntax, but I suppose that the past 4 years of scala made me instantly translate the code in functional fashion and it was all smooth. On the other, while it's wrapped differently, the whole idea of "this object will start emitting events, and we will be having functions as callback on them defined in various objects" really feels a lot like good old java observables/listeners, even if it's applied with a different paradigm. The stream part really feels like an implementation detail to me, it's just less boilerplate than before. Then again, it was just an anecdote based on reading code in a language I don't use ^^ javascript and typescript aren't even mentioned on my resume, for good reasons, so I should be safe in interviews !

alasdair_ 7y ago

Seeing someone fire up wireshark, sniff some traffic and solve a complex production issue in five minutes by looking at the raw packets never gets old.

phektus 7y ago

> Admittedly, I have no clue if the management realises that ! Well, that's the key thing in many places: it's management that decides whether to hire and how much to offer, not you :) The first instinct would be to put 'resources' that costs little into a project, and that usually means people with less experience that requires less pay and are easier to drag around. Imagine the difficulty they will be having trying to grok your line of reasoning for respecting and going after these older devs.