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I call it the "grumpy old fart" syndrome. I've (M50+) felt it - the urge to stop learning and complain at everything that changes. It is a struggle to continue

I call it the "grumpy old fart" syndrome. I've (M50+) felt it - the urge to stop learning and complain at everything that changes. It is a struggle to continue learning at this age. But it is worth it. Being a grumpy old fart sucks all the joy out of life.

Aeolun 5y ago
So does keeping up with all the latest hotness when you already know it won’t fix your organizational problems. Hell, I’m only 33 and when asked today what I currently want to learn, had to seriously consider that I didn’t want to learn anything new in particular.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  We picked the wrong century to quit learning ;)
- lightbendover 5y ago
  I would feel more inclined to continue to "learn" (read: pick up shiny new frameworks, not actually learn new fundamentals) if the new stuff wasn't just rehashed old stuff. If I need to pick something up, fine, that's trivial, but "learning" for the sake of "learning" is best left to the juniors.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  I tell them the truth: I wanna go deep in my stack (Ruby) to the point of learning C and VMs to understand how the Ruby interpreter works. This is what interests me; I really can't see how learning Node or Elixir is gonna make a better programmer than what I want to do.
dgb23 5y ago
As I understand the research the "struggle" is more cultural than inherent/biological. It just so happens that a good chunk of people tend to stop learning and pushing themselves for what ever reason. But if you keep at it, or get back to it, your brain adapts over time and becomes more flexible to to speak. And by "learning" they mean things that are just slightly outside of your comfort zone. Anecdotally, people who do that for a very long time, tend to be really smart and interesting I found. It's such a wonderful thing.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Learning is hard - you are pushing the plasticity of your brain. It is like cutting grooves into your brain - but fortunately the experience of insight when you understand new things is quite pleasurable. I think it may take more “conscious intentionality” to choose that discomfort as one ages but it is surely worth it for a life of pleasure. I won’t say learning go channels and go routines was as big a sunflower burst as call back event based programming in C was as a young man, but it was unmistakably cool. Even learning the thought behind all the god-forsaken Java patterns or the dumb borrow checking for Rust make me a larger thinker and better reader and listener to technical ideas. A life of constant curiosity and willingness to tolerate the pains of learning is a lifetime of childlike awe and playfulness.
joelbluminator 5y ago
How much do you need to learn though? Why not settle for .Net or Java or Node or Django or Rails (if doing web)? They didn't change that brutally in the past 10 years. Sure, there are changes, but nothing that 2-4 hours of catching up monthly won't fix. I think the issue becomes worse when you change stacks a lot, that isn't very sustainable to me.

Aeolun 5y ago

So does keeping up with all the latest hotness when you already know it won’t fix your organizational problems. Hell, I’m only 33 and when asked today what I currently want to learn, had to seriously consider that I didn’t want to learn anything new in particular.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
We picked the wrong century to quit learning ;)
lightbendover 5y ago
I would feel more inclined to continue to "learn" (read: pick up shiny new frameworks, not actually learn new fundamentals) if the new stuff wasn't just rehashed old stuff. If I need to pick something up, fine, that's trivial, but "learning" for the sake of "learning" is best left to the juniors.
joelbluminator 5y ago
I tell them the truth: I wanna go deep in my stack (Ruby) to the point of learning C and VMs to understand how the Ruby interpreter works. This is what interests me; I really can't see how learning Node or Elixir is gonna make a better programmer than what I want to do.

dgb23 5y ago

As I understand the research the "struggle" is more cultural than inherent/biological. It just so happens that a good chunk of people tend to stop learning and pushing themselves for what ever reason. But if you keep at it, or get back to it, your brain adapts over time and becomes more flexible to to speak. And by "learning" they mean things that are just slightly outside of your comfort zone. Anecdotally, people who do that for a very long time, tend to be really smart and interesting I found. It's such a wonderful thing.

lanstin 5y ago
Learning is hard - you are pushing the plasticity of your brain. It is like cutting grooves into your brain - but fortunately the experience of insight when you understand new things is quite pleasurable. I think it may take more “conscious intentionality” to choose that discomfort as one ages but it is surely worth it for a life of pleasure. I won’t say learning go channels and go routines was as big a sunflower burst as call back event based programming in C was as a young man, but it was unmistakably cool. Even learning the thought behind all the god-forsaken Java patterns or the dumb borrow checking for Rust make me a larger thinker and better reader and listener to technical ideas. A life of constant curiosity and willingness to tolerate the pains of learning is a lifetime of childlike awe and playfulness.

joelbluminator 5y ago

How much do you need to learn though? Why not settle for .Net or Java or Node or Django or Rails (if doing web)? They didn't change that brutally in the past 10 years. Sure, there are changes, but nothing that 2-4 hours of catching up monthly won't fix. I think the issue becomes worse when you change stacks a lot, that isn't very sustainable to me.