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> Spending your weekends learning the latest JS framework because you don't want to be someone "who doesn't keep up", is not fun. It's not about JS frameworks

> Spending your weekends learning the latest JS framework because you don't want to be someone "who doesn't keep up", is not fun. It's not about JS frameworks, but if you don't keep up with technology _because it's fun_; and you also what to be promoted very high on the ladder (aren't happy with "just" an average job with average pay that lets you have a decent life outside work) by all means do yourself a favor and move to management. > because you can't invert a binary tree in 20 secs in leetcode It's a simple recursion. why wouldn't I be able to do it? I fully expect to solve algorithms & data structures questions into my 60s faster than the average 20yo can (because of my background. Point is, it doesn't correlate with age, if you can't do it at 40 you probably weren't great at it at 20). > 2. Being managed by someone a decade younger than you with no family or responsibilities, is not fun. I've been managed by former students. Worked out quite fine for me. Why wouldn't it? Age does not equal competence.... I'd rather be managed by a competent young guy than an incompetent senior. (bad managers are no fun, that I agree; but bad managers are not necessarily young; and young managers are not necessarily bad) > Being paid less than the lowest grade manager, is not fun. Being paid less than what you're happy with is no fun. But it's not really required. > do you really need 20 yrs of coding experience to write CRUD apps So don't write CRUD apps if you're better than that. > What exactly are you bringing to the table. In general, knowing what NOT to do. Finding out & solving the right problem, not the one that was given to me. > There is no such thing as "IC track" for almost every one of us, If that were true, it all becomes a huge pyramidal scheme (you constantly need more young developers so that you can manage them as existing workforce ages). I'll give you that: for most people, it's probably easier to advance on the management track than it is on the IC track. And the IC track in many companies is a joke (if you're not at the headquarters, advancing is an order of magnitude harder; also you advance easier by playing the advancement game than by being competent in what you do - but that may be true for management too). So yeah, it's not for everybody. But OTOH, middle management sucks... big time. For some people, it may be a good deal to sacrifice some cache upside than to turn into something they don't want to be. It all boils down to what you want to optimize. If you're happy with a good income, even if it's not the best that you could possibly achieve, IC track might be an option (still, change companies every now and then. It's much easier to promote this way).

leghifla 7y ago
>> What exactly are you bringing to the table. > In general, knowing what NOT to do. Finding out & solving the right problem, not the one that was given to me. So true. I would add the ability to look farther ahead at potential problems. I have seen so many young people blocked by some issues that should have been spotted way earlier.
dominotw 7y ago
> It's a simple recursion. why wouldn't I be able to do it? I fully expect to solve algorithms & data structures questions into my 60s faster than the average 20yo can (because of my background. Point is, it doesn't correlate with age, if you can't do it at 40 you probably weren't great at it at 20). ok. I was being facetious with that (particularly famous) example. you are able to breeze through hard leetcodes in your 40's in a tech interview setting? Why would you be faster at 60's vs 20's , not sure i follow the line of reasoning. > So don't write CRUD apps if you're better than that. Can you give me some examples of better things that actually require 20yrs of experience ?
- virgilp 7y ago
  For context I have 2 medals at IOI in highschool. I'm not the most competent in the world (best in my country took 4, all of them gold) but still I'm not too shabby. Am I as good as I was in my 20s? No. But the truth is that most people can't do the simple recursion... very few places will deny you employment because you can't invent original algorithms on the spot. They'd just fail tou for simple examples like the one you presented. The amount of people who can't do a tree traversal unless it's DFS is staggering. (and in all honesty, not all of them are useless programmers... sometimes people would do amazing stuff despite failing basic algorithmic tasks. That's what makes hiring decisions so hard.) [edit] > Can you give me some examples of better things that actually require 20yrs of experience ? I saw this just now. Lots of things can use said 20yrs of experience... maybe even some CRUD apps (e.g. to know what to not over-design). Some things you probably can't do right without extensive experience (say, design a new programming langugage; or a new datastore). E.g. Rich Hickey famously designed Clojure because he wanted a better way to do those "CRUD apps". Also, it's quite easy to find a hard problem that you won't solve without extensive experience, no matter how smart you are (say: collaboration, data management & versioning in large AI teams). Pretty much any open-ended problem, really... remove all constraints and most programmers will get stuck. How many people can start with "void main()" (or equivalent) and actually release it to production, if the project takes a non-trivial amount of time to complete?

leghifla 7y ago

>> What exactly are you bringing to the table. > In general, knowing what NOT to do. Finding out & solving the right problem, not the one that was given to me. So true. I would add the ability to look farther ahead at potential problems. I have seen so many young people blocked by some issues that should have been spotted way earlier.

dominotw 7y ago

> It's a simple recursion. why wouldn't I be able to do it? I fully expect to solve algorithms & data structures questions into my 60s faster than the average 20yo can (because of my background. Point is, it doesn't correlate with age, if you can't do it at 40 you probably weren't great at it at 20). ok. I was being facetious with that (particularly famous) example. you are able to breeze through hard leetcodes in your 40's in a tech interview setting? Why would you be faster at 60's vs 20's , not sure i follow the line of reasoning. > So don't write CRUD apps if you're better than that. Can you give me some examples of better things that actually require 20yrs of experience ?

virgilp 7y ago
For context I have 2 medals at IOI in highschool. I'm not the most competent in the world (best in my country took 4, all of them gold) but still I'm not too shabby. Am I as good as I was in my 20s? No. But the truth is that most people can't do the simple recursion... very few places will deny you employment because you can't invent original algorithms on the spot. They'd just fail tou for simple examples like the one you presented. The amount of people who can't do a tree traversal unless it's DFS is staggering. (and in all honesty, not all of them are useless programmers... sometimes people would do amazing stuff despite failing basic algorithmic tasks. That's what makes hiring decisions so hard.) [edit] > Can you give me some examples of better things that actually require 20yrs of experience ? I saw this just now. Lots of things can use said 20yrs of experience... maybe even some CRUD apps (e.g. to know what to not over-design). Some things you probably can't do right without extensive experience (say, design a new programming langugage; or a new datastore). E.g. Rich Hickey famously designed Clojure because he wanted a better way to do those "CRUD apps". Also, it's quite easy to find a hard problem that you won't solve without extensive experience, no matter how smart you are (say: collaboration, data management & versioning in large AI teams). Pretty much any open-ended problem, really... remove all constraints and most programmers will get stuck. How many people can start with "void main()" (or equivalent) and actually release it to production, if the project takes a non-trivial amount of time to complete?