10 ms·

In addition to ageism, I think the proliferation of the MBA/McKinsey school of thought really works against older programmers. You have an increasing number of

by tharne 5y ago

In addition to ageism, I think the proliferation of the MBA/McKinsey school of thought really works against older programmers. You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge around 1) Programming, and 2) whatever industry they happen to be working in. What's worse, is that they see no problem with this because they think they "understand business". What this leads to is a lot of dumb decisions. One example in this case is that, to someone who's never written a line of code, a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. You need to have a decent understanding of the work developers do, in order to understand the value the 50 year-old developer brings and why paying him or her 2 or 3x the 25 year-old is actually a bargain.

sokoloff 5y ago
One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap. Most company’s best 5% 25 year-old developers are probably creating more value than their median 50 year-old developer, even though that median senior dev is creating more value than the median 25 year-old.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide I kind of disagree with this, although I don't think it's age that separates developers. But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If I understand your comment correctly, I think we're agreeing (that there is a wide range [high variance] of value delivered across the population: think of a bell curve that's "smooshed" down to be short and wide).
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Quite possibly. I realised after I posted that I wasn't quite sure what the axis of your plot were (I'm still not).
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        X axis is value delivered per engineer, increasing with X. Y axis is a histogram of “number of engineers producing that value”, increasing with Y. This, but for value instead of IQ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Yes, when you look at those differences any performance drop due to age is going to look tiny in comparison. What I have found though is a lack of willingness to put up with bullshit. Stuff I accepted as normal in my twenties I'd just walk away from now. This is probably good for the employer but maybe not for your immediate manager.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    “ But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.” True. But most people reach that point after a few years or never.
- eastbayjake 5y ago
  Yes, you hit the plateau of that curve pretty quickly. You can't just be an individual contributor and justify 3% raises every year for 30 years, when you hit that plateau on raw skill you need to start finding ways to player-coach the generation(s) of more junior developers behind you. I don't think that necessarily means you have to move into management, but it does mean broadening your definition of impact beyond LoC/commits/tickets.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    1.5 to 3.0% of those 3% raises are inflation/cost-of-living adjustment, which seem like they should be able to continue forever.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    > broadening your definition of impact beyond LoC/commits/tickets. Is this the 'classic' expectation for a dev? Where I work the least technical person is the PM and everyone else comes together to determine what gets done and how it gets done. Everyone knows the tech side and decisions gets filtered down to the rank and file. Taking initiatives are expected - I know this is likely the exception not the norm, but I hope future workplaces are more like this and less like that.
- Tarucho 5y ago
  >One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap. This can also be said of managers. Then why aren´t they discriminated by age too?
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Because they are smarter and work the system. Same for sales guys, lawyers and so on. They work the system to their advantage. Developers are one of the few groups that believes in a just meritocracy.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Agree about the value curve. Most developers do stuff that can be learned in a few years and then they just repeat the same thing with slight variation. There are really not that many jobs where you get challenged to grow throughout your career. It’s just repetition (like most other jobs)
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Also known as "1 year of experience, 12 times" (or "2 years, 6 times")
    - Retric 5y ago
      I frequently hear that, but in practically every other profession doing the exact same thing for 20 years is still valued. And the underlying reality is you can’t do the exact same thing for 12 years in the computer field. Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time.
      - canadian_tired 5y ago
        "Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time." Absolutely. I will be using this one.
    - Tarucho 5y ago
      This is not exclusive to dev work. Same can be said of managers.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Anyone in the trades is doing such a job. If you're a plumber, or electrician, or cabinet maker, or framing carpenter, or a mechanic, even if those 12 years (or 20 years or more) seem similar to people outside the field, you're learning all the time. It never stops, until you do.
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
- Retric 5y ago
  I’ve worked with a lot of young developers and never met a 25 year old developer that’s creating more value than the average 50 year old developer with 20+ years experience. In theory sure it’s possible, but in practice it simply doesn’t happen even close to 5% of the time. The thing is most people quit the field long before putting in 20+ years. So, I suspect it’s less about the experience than the filtering process.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago
  So senior devs are better than 95% of 25 year olds. Since finding a "best 5%" is almost impossible, because who knows until you hire them and they work there for a while, the best bet is to hire people who are older. Also, for a bone fide best 5%, they are going to work at the cool companies, and never will work at a sewer processing government utility company in their IT department, or work at for a local chain of tire stores with 50 locations and an IT staff of 3 people. So, one might as well not even worry about the top 5%.
jnwatson 5y ago
These days, there is no excuse to have a non-technical manager (unless you are a technical manager yourself). Software is eating the world; it is professional negligence to put someone in charge that doesn't have a detailed understanding of the technology that impacts everything about the modern workplace. It isn't like there is a shortage of technical managers right now. I've never had a non-technical manager, even when I worked in sales, and I've been doing this for over 20 years.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  This must be industry variant then. 3 of my 4 jobs in the last 30 years have involved non-technical leadership. The exception was working for a "tools" company where software was the product. But the other 3 are at the "edge" where software enables real devices to be more modern/gadgety. In that context, software programmers are a necessary evil to en-smart-ify gadgets that have traditionally been "dumb." And letting software people be part of the direction is too much of a loss of traditional power.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    That’s why I recommend that young people should try to work for a company where the CEO comes from a tech background and understands your work. It’s just natural that someone has more respect for a role they have performed themselves.
    - travisgriggs 5y ago
      Why do you recommend this to young people specifically? Wouldn't it be sound advice regardless of the age of the recipient of this advice? Just curious why you've added that qualifier.
      - spaetzleesser 5y ago
        I guess i don’t give advice to people my age ;). getting into tech companies also seems easier when you are young and don’t have much of a resume. Having a resume with years in not interesting companies and uncool tech also seems to make you toxic.
joelbluminator 5y ago
> without the hassles of things like kids to take care of That's not accurate. At 35 there are young kids, maybe even 45. At 50 they're pretty much independent, at least aged 10-12. So actually, if you hire a 32 year old dev you should be more concerned about kids than if you hire a 50 year old. So if that's the concern, only hire 18 year olds I guess, or maybe even 15.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Actually if you hire 25-year-olds, they're probably going to start having kids right around the time you need them the most.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    yeah, but the plan is: lay them off once they start having kids, and hire new 25-year olds. source: 25+ years experience in this industry.
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      Consulting industry?
    - smsm42 5y ago
      Can believe it. But: you don't need the whole industry. You need to find one good place to work in. Those exist. May it pay a bit less than soulless corp? Sure, maybe - or maybe not. But my 25+ yr experience shows they do exist.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  The spread is quite wide. I got my first kid at 45 and now almost 50 working 75% to take care of two kids the rest of the time. The flip side is that I have never been so focused during working hours as now. I’m getting quite much more done in six hours than I used to get done in eight or nine.
  - 5y ago
wmeredith 5y ago
> You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge After seeing this time and time again, and because I was getting older, I made a conscious decision to move into management. Be the change you want to see in the world, right? Now my output is mostly spreadsheets and powerpoint, but I enable my team to do good work as I insulate them from the bullshit. I can always get down into the trenches or work on a side project if I need to scratch that creative itch.
- apples_oranges 5y ago
  Yes! It's probably just a demographics thing that will even itself out in the future. I mean: People like you will become managers and there are many programmers in the younger generations to draw candidates from.
  - winphone1974 5y ago
    Haha! Cause nobody every changes, loses their edge or falls out of touch with their tech roots, right? We just need to get these clueless dinosaurs out of power before the current woke kids take over!
- logshipper 5y ago
  I really respect that attitude. I happen to be doing a security assessment on some products (PuTTY etc) at the firm (Fortune Global 100) where I am interning. It baffled me to read a directive from management that said that we should shy away from open-source projects - I must confess that I was somewhat frustrated at the sheer ignorance in the memo but your comment allows me to see a silver-lining. I hope that one day I can rise up to management and make decisions based on greater nuance than simply saying "OSS bad and insecure".
  - TimPC 5y ago
    I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor. In many cases, if you integrate a third party paid solution you can file a bug on that solution with reasonable confidence it can be a priority. If you use code from another team at the company you know you can file bugs on them. If you write code yourself you have confidence in fixing it. There is a danger with integrating OSS that you have code in your stack that no one knows well enough to fix and no one is responsible for. If something breaks you might have to learn a sizeable amount of code and domain knowledge to make a fix. Filing bugs on OSS is not viewed in the same way as filing bugs on paid third party solutions as whether the bugs are a priority to an OSS solution seems more risky. Note that large amounts of OSS is used in companies, but it's generally code that developers are expected to know well enough to dive into if need be. And code that is popular enough to be well tested for bugs and known that breaking errors in the framework will get fixes. Examples would be things like Python or Node.js. As a manager a potential problem you can have is a major bug your team is responsible for that no one is qualified to fix and thus your only reasonable time estimate is unknown. Avoiding certain parts of OSS is often a precaution against this situation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hinkley 5y ago
The young MBA people are intimidated by people who can reject their schoolbook ideas coherently. Most of those people are older, but not all of them. I started noticing this before I was thirty, either reacting to me or to someone I agreed with who happened to be older. It only gets worse.
rmason 5y ago
Recently Ford was in the news here in Michigan regarding layoffs. They found emails saying if an employee is over 55, have a career of large success and as a result are paid above average then lay them off. Ford is facing huge challenges as the entire industry has to pivot to battery powered vehicles and they want to get rid of their best and most experienced people? This will not end well for them. I'd be just the opposite and try to convince these folks to work until 75!
- kjksf 5y ago
  That sure sucked but this was not about the age but about the cost. They wanted to fire the most expensive people. In union shops seniority tends to go in hand with higher pay. And I'm guessing their thinking was that the closer someone is to retirement, the more likely they are to accept a payout offer.
- Retric 5y ago
  This is likely a direct result of the EV transition. They now have a lot of people with 30 years experience that’s seemingly irrelevant.
omgwtfbbq 5y ago
>a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of Bunt functionally this is correct. If they are both "Senior Devs" they're going to be roughly equivalent. If you are 50 and haven't gotten architect/tech-lead/principal roles etc. you're probably at your ceiling and you aren't really going to be much more valuable than that 25 year old.
dr-detroit 5y ago
Women cant have kids when theyre 50. have kids when youre 20. Stab anyone who tells you not to.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. I was a fairly good programmer when I was 25. I'm a MASSIVELY better programmer at 57 than I was back then. My memory is a bit worse, and for certain kinds of problems, I may be a bit slower than I was at peak (maybe around 42-47). But hire me now, and you'll get a better programmer than you would ever have gotten from this body in the past. And, guess what: no kids to take care of because they've already grown into fully fledged adults and lead their own lives.
Aperocky 5y ago
> increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge I think it's on the downward trend though. Where I work, more managers than not used to be an engineer, and the younger they are, the more likely they're going to used to be engineers (or straight up converted).
urthor 5y ago
Isn't the trend against this approach? It seems at least in tech, the view is that this is not so good.

by tharne 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago

One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap. Most company’s best 5% 25 year-old developers are probably creating more value than their median 50 year-old developer, even though that median senior dev is creating more value than the median 25 year-old.

nicoburns 5y ago
> One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide I kind of disagree with this, although I don't think it's age that separates developers. But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If I understand your comment correctly, I think we're agreeing (that there is a wide range [high variance] of value delivered across the population: think of a bell curve that's "smooshed" down to be short and wide).
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Quite possibly. I realised after I posted that I wasn't quite sure what the axis of your plot were (I'm still not).
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      X axis is value delivered per engineer, increasing with X. Y axis is a histogram of “number of engineers producing that value”, increasing with Y. This, but for value instead of IQ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Yes, when you look at those differences any performance drop due to age is going to look tiny in comparison. What I have found though is a lack of willingness to put up with bullshit. Stuff I accepted as normal in my twenties I'd just walk away from now. This is probably good for the employer but maybe not for your immediate manager.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  “ But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.” True. But most people reach that point after a few years or never.
eastbayjake 5y ago
Yes, you hit the plateau of that curve pretty quickly. You can't just be an individual contributor and justify 3% raises every year for 30 years, when you hit that plateau on raw skill you need to start finding ways to player-coach the generation(s) of more junior developers behind you. I don't think that necessarily means you have to move into management, but it does mean broadening your definition of impact beyond LoC/commits/tickets.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  1.5 to 3.0% of those 3% raises are inflation/cost-of-living adjustment, which seem like they should be able to continue forever.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  > broadening your definition of impact beyond LoC/commits/tickets. Is this the 'classic' expectation for a dev? Where I work the least technical person is the PM and everyone else comes together to determine what gets done and how it gets done. Everyone knows the tech side and decisions gets filtered down to the rank and file. Taking initiatives are expected - I know this is likely the exception not the norm, but I hope future workplaces are more like this and less like that.
Tarucho 5y ago
>One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap. This can also be said of managers. Then why aren´t they discriminated by age too?
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Because they are smarter and work the system. Same for sales guys, lawyers and so on. They work the system to their advantage. Developers are one of the few groups that believes in a just meritocracy.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
Agree about the value curve. Most developers do stuff that can be learned in a few years and then they just repeat the same thing with slight variation. There are really not that many jobs where you get challenged to grow throughout your career. It’s just repetition (like most other jobs)
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Also known as "1 year of experience, 12 times" (or "2 years, 6 times")
  - Retric 5y ago
    I frequently hear that, but in practically every other profession doing the exact same thing for 20 years is still valued. And the underlying reality is you can’t do the exact same thing for 12 years in the computer field. Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time.
    - canadian_tired 5y ago
      "Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time." Absolutely. I will be using this one.
  - Tarucho 5y ago
    This is not exclusive to dev work. Same can be said of managers.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Anyone in the trades is doing such a job. If you're a plumber, or electrician, or cabinet maker, or framing carpenter, or a mechanic, even if those 12 years (or 20 years or more) seem similar to people outside the field, you're learning all the time. It never stops, until you do.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
Retric 5y ago
I’ve worked with a lot of young developers and never met a 25 year old developer that’s creating more value than the average 50 year old developer with 20+ years experience. In theory sure it’s possible, but in practice it simply doesn’t happen even close to 5% of the time. The thing is most people quit the field long before putting in 20+ years. So, I suspect it’s less about the experience than the filtering process.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
So senior devs are better than 95% of 25 year olds. Since finding a "best 5%" is almost impossible, because who knows until you hire them and they work there for a while, the best bet is to hire people who are older. Also, for a bone fide best 5%, they are going to work at the cool companies, and never will work at a sewer processing government utility company in their IT department, or work at for a local chain of tire stores with 50 locations and an IT staff of 3 people. So, one might as well not even worry about the top 5%.

jnwatson 5y ago

These days, there is no excuse to have a non-technical manager (unless you are a technical manager yourself). Software is eating the world; it is professional negligence to put someone in charge that doesn't have a detailed understanding of the technology that impacts everything about the modern workplace. It isn't like there is a shortage of technical managers right now. I've never had a non-technical manager, even when I worked in sales, and I've been doing this for over 20 years.

travisgriggs 5y ago
This must be industry variant then. 3 of my 4 jobs in the last 30 years have involved non-technical leadership. The exception was working for a "tools" company where software was the product. But the other 3 are at the "edge" where software enables real devices to be more modern/gadgety. In that context, software programmers are a necessary evil to en-smart-ify gadgets that have traditionally been "dumb." And letting software people be part of the direction is too much of a loss of traditional power.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  That’s why I recommend that young people should try to work for a company where the CEO comes from a tech background and understands your work. It’s just natural that someone has more respect for a role they have performed themselves.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    Why do you recommend this to young people specifically? Wouldn't it be sound advice regardless of the age of the recipient of this advice? Just curious why you've added that qualifier.
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
      I guess i don’t give advice to people my age ;). getting into tech companies also seems easier when you are young and don’t have much of a resume. Having a resume with years in not interesting companies and uncool tech also seems to make you toxic.

joelbluminator 5y ago

> without the hassles of things like kids to take care of That's not accurate. At 35 there are young kids, maybe even 45. At 50 they're pretty much independent, at least aged 10-12. So actually, if you hire a 32 year old dev you should be more concerned about kids than if you hire a 50 year old. So if that's the concern, only hire 18 year olds I guess, or maybe even 15.

commandlinefan 5y ago
Actually if you hire 25-year-olds, they're probably going to start having kids right around the time you need them the most.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  yeah, but the plan is: lay them off once they start having kids, and hire new 25-year olds. source: 25+ years experience in this industry.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    Consulting industry?
  - smsm42 5y ago
    Can believe it. But: you don't need the whole industry. You need to find one good place to work in. Those exist. May it pay a bit less than soulless corp? Sure, maybe - or maybe not. But my 25+ yr experience shows they do exist.
Ma8ee 5y ago
The spread is quite wide. I got my first kid at 45 and now almost 50 working 75% to take care of two kids the rest of the time. The flip side is that I have never been so focused during working hours as now. I’m getting quite much more done in six hours than I used to get done in eight or nine.
- 5y ago

wmeredith 5y ago

> You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge After seeing this time and time again, and because I was getting older, I made a conscious decision to move into management. Be the change you want to see in the world, right? Now my output is mostly spreadsheets and powerpoint, but I enable my team to do good work as I insulate them from the bullshit. I can always get down into the trenches or work on a side project if I need to scratch that creative itch.

apples_oranges 5y ago
Yes! It's probably just a demographics thing that will even itself out in the future. I mean: People like you will become managers and there are many programmers in the younger generations to draw candidates from.
- winphone1974 5y ago
  Haha! Cause nobody every changes, loses their edge or falls out of touch with their tech roots, right? We just need to get these clueless dinosaurs out of power before the current woke kids take over!
logshipper 5y ago
I really respect that attitude. I happen to be doing a security assessment on some products (PuTTY etc) at the firm (Fortune Global 100) where I am interning. It baffled me to read a directive from management that said that we should shy away from open-source projects - I must confess that I was somewhat frustrated at the sheer ignorance in the memo but your comment allows me to see a silver-lining. I hope that one day I can rise up to management and make decisions based on greater nuance than simply saying "OSS bad and insecure".
- TimPC 5y ago
  I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor. In many cases, if you integrate a third party paid solution you can file a bug on that solution with reasonable confidence it can be a priority. If you use code from another team at the company you know you can file bugs on them. If you write code yourself you have confidence in fixing it. There is a danger with integrating OSS that you have code in your stack that no one knows well enough to fix and no one is responsible for. If something breaks you might have to learn a sizeable amount of code and domain knowledge to make a fix. Filing bugs on OSS is not viewed in the same way as filing bugs on paid third party solutions as whether the bugs are a priority to an OSS solution seems more risky. Note that large amounts of OSS is used in companies, but it's generally code that developers are expected to know well enough to dive into if need be. And code that is popular enough to be well tested for bugs and known that breaking errors in the framework will get fixes. Examples would be things like Python or Node.js. As a manager a potential problem you can have is a major bug your team is responsible for that no one is qualified to fix and thus your only reasonable time estimate is unknown. Avoiding certain parts of OSS is often a precaution against this situation.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hinkley 5y ago

The young MBA people are intimidated by people who can reject their schoolbook ideas coherently. Most of those people are older, but not all of them. I started noticing this before I was thirty, either reacting to me or to someone I agreed with who happened to be older. It only gets worse.

rmason 5y ago

Recently Ford was in the news here in Michigan regarding layoffs. They found emails saying if an employee is over 55, have a career of large success and as a result are paid above average then lay them off. Ford is facing huge challenges as the entire industry has to pivot to battery powered vehicles and they want to get rid of their best and most experienced people? This will not end well for them. I'd be just the opposite and try to convince these folks to work until 75!

kjksf 5y ago
That sure sucked but this was not about the age but about the cost. They wanted to fire the most expensive people. In union shops seniority tends to go in hand with higher pay. And I'm guessing their thinking was that the closer someone is to retirement, the more likely they are to accept a payout offer.
Retric 5y ago
This is likely a direct result of the EV transition. They now have a lot of people with 30 years experience that’s seemingly irrelevant.

omgwtfbbq 5y ago

>a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of Bunt functionally this is correct. If they are both "Senior Devs" they're going to be roughly equivalent. If you are 50 and haven't gotten architect/tech-lead/principal roles etc. you're probably at your ceiling and you aren't really going to be much more valuable than that 25 year old.

dr-detroit 5y ago

Women cant have kids when theyre 50. have kids when youre 20. Stab anyone who tells you not to.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. I was a fairly good programmer when I was 25. I'm a MASSIVELY better programmer at 57 than I was back then. My memory is a bit worse, and for certain kinds of problems, I may be a bit slower than I was at peak (maybe around 42-47). But hire me now, and you'll get a better programmer than you would ever have gotten from this body in the past. And, guess what: no kids to take care of because they've already grown into fully fledged adults and lead their own lives.

Aperocky 5y ago

> increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge I think it's on the downward trend though. Where I work, more managers than not used to be an engineer, and the younger they are, the more likely they're going to used to be engineers (or straight up converted).

urthor 5y ago

Isn't the trend against this approach? It seems at least in tech, the view is that this is not so good.