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Mad respect for you sir. What advice would you give a 35 year old software engineer who's worried about being obsolete in 10 years?

mark_l_watson 5y ago
Keep learning new tech. I would expect major retraining to be required much more often than even 10 or 20 years ago. Personally, I am a big fan of Coursera and eDX online courses, but any form of study is good. Someone from HN just emailed me about this HN thread, and I will make the same comment to you as I did in an e-mail: “”” Every morning first thing, I spend a minute or two thinking of everything that I am grateful for, and having a useful job is on my gratitude list. If I don’t do this, then sometimes I find it more difficult to be motivated at my remote job.””” A feeling of gratitude gives me energy to keep learning and maintain curiousity.
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  I agree. I'm 50 and don't feel as though the sun has set on my usefulness yet. I'm definitely experiencing more demand than ever. My personal philosophy is similar and I very much love the work I do. 1. My role is to help the team. 2. Stay humble. There is always a better way to do something and we're very lucky to be in our position. 3. Practice not talking. Let others have the experience of figuring it out for themselves. Interject if you can help get them unstuck. 4. Always be learning.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I'm 55. I'm tired of learning. I've been learning for 30+ years of professional software work, and none of it applies to any new jobs I might want to seek (I'm talking about specific languages, platforms, buzzwords, etc.) The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. I can see that by the time I retire, the knowledge I have spent my adult life acquiring will be useless historical trivia. It's depressing. My plan when I retire is to have nothing whatsoever to do with software. It can't come soon enough.
    - ativzzz 5y ago
      > The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with each change, but because more and more new technologies and niches are being created, there are more and more opportunities to be competent in a certain niche. It's also so much about your mindset. Seeing the difference in positive and negative mindset between you and the comment root is eye opening. When you think everything is "useless historical trivia" and is "depressing", of course anything you try to learn will be useless, tiring and depressing. One of the things I'm trying to really improve in my own personal life is my mindset. I have/had a mindset similar to yours (I'm much younger too) and I've noticed how draining it is to my overall mental health. I'm trying to be more optimistic and positive about things. Life is too short to be depressed and upset about something you spend 1/3 of your waking hours doing.
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        I used to have that positive outlook. Work was exciting, and fun. Over time, the reality became impossible to deny.
        ativzzz 5y ago
        Yup, that's why I'm trying to make the positive mindset a habit and hopefully keep it as I get older. We'll see how it ends up.
        notyourwork 5y ago
        Ignorance can be bliss.
    - newaccount74 5y ago
      > The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. I'm only 35, but until now I feel the opposite is true. I've started to learn C, HTML, CSS, Javascript when I was a teenager more than 20 years ago. The knowledge and skills I learned then are still as relevant today as they were then. Sure, there's flexbox now instead of tables, but the basic idea of HTML vs CSS vs Javascript is still the same, I can still make a basic website for a project in a few hours. Vertically centering something on the screen is still harder than it should be. C now lets me declare variables anywhere, and there's a nicer syntax for initialising structs, but pointers work the same as they did 20 years ago. Knowing C is still as useful today as it was then. My main focus for some years has been Mac desktop development. While a lot of new things was introduced in the last decade, it has all been mostly incremental changes, and even if you skipped a few years of progress catching up isn't that hard. It helps to be aware of some general trends. I've read about async/await years ago when it was introduced in C# I think? and now it's coming in Swift. Sure, it's a slightly different way of thinking about concurrency, but one or two new concepts every 5 years should be doable. Also, you don't need to learn everything. For example, the whole Reactive / Flux technologies with event sources and subscribers sounded really interesting, but I never really was able to get into them (you can probably tell by the fact that this paragraph makes no sense), and I'm doing just fine.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    Yep me too. I am 50+ and sharper than ever. Having more than 40 years of programming experience makes it easy for me to solve most software development problems. However I am still learning how to handle difficult personalities. That is still a challenge. I am getting better though.
- sidcool 5y ago
  Thanks for your response. If I may continue to pick your mind, can you elaborate on what you consider new tech? Do you refer to new languages, frameworks, programming paradigms? Also, what is your suggestion for learning algorithms and data structures?
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    Examples of "new tech": common use of deep learning models in many types of applications and services, higher level web based tools for managing data and infrastructure, mobile devices that can do on-device deep learning model inferencing and sometimes even training, etc. I like and enjoy several programming languages, but I don't consider new languages and frameworks to be paradigm shifting. Still interesting though. As someone else here mentioned, there are so many new tech niches being created; learn one or two. Having work life balance is super important, but I find that skipping watching movies or TV a couple evenings a week gives me plenty of off-work time to learn new stuff. My wife accepts that a few evening a week I don't join her in watching a movie after dinner (we sit in the same room, and she puts on earphones).
    - xupybd 5y ago
      You touched on something I struggle with. If it's not too personal do you mind if I ask how you navigated that discussion with your wife? I hold great hope that one day I'll be able to spend 5-10 hours a week learning.
      - sizzle 5y ago
        Have an honest discussion and don’t make it an argument.
        clarge1120 5y ago
        The best thing I’ve done for the family is set expectations that I’ll only be working for 15 minutes to an hour. I call it “plodding”. Then I really try to get something done in that time. Ever since I started plodding, and stuck to the promise, my wife has been supportive. She’s even supportive of late nights and weekends if I will avoid locking myself in a room for hours at a time.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Keep learning new tech. I would expect major retraining to be required much more often than even 10 or 20 years ago. Personally, I am a big fan of Coursera and eDX online courses, but any form of study is good. Someone from HN just emailed me about this HN thread, and I will make the same comment to you as I did in an e-mail: “”” Every morning first thing, I spend a minute or two thinking of everything that I am grateful for, and having a useful job is on my gratitude list. If I don’t do this, then sometimes I find it more difficult to be motivated at my remote job.””” A feeling of gratitude gives me energy to keep learning and maintain curiousity.

jason-phillips 5y ago
I agree. I'm 50 and don't feel as though the sun has set on my usefulness yet. I'm definitely experiencing more demand than ever. My personal philosophy is similar and I very much love the work I do. 1. My role is to help the team. 2. Stay humble. There is always a better way to do something and we're very lucky to be in our position. 3. Practice not talking. Let others have the experience of figuring it out for themselves. Interject if you can help get them unstuck. 4. Always be learning.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I'm 55. I'm tired of learning. I've been learning for 30+ years of professional software work, and none of it applies to any new jobs I might want to seek (I'm talking about specific languages, platforms, buzzwords, etc.) The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. I can see that by the time I retire, the knowledge I have spent my adult life acquiring will be useless historical trivia. It's depressing. My plan when I retire is to have nothing whatsoever to do with software. It can't come soon enough.
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    > The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with each change, but because more and more new technologies and niches are being created, there are more and more opportunities to be competent in a certain niche. It's also so much about your mindset. Seeing the difference in positive and negative mindset between you and the comment root is eye opening. When you think everything is "useless historical trivia" and is "depressing", of course anything you try to learn will be useless, tiring and depressing. One of the things I'm trying to really improve in my own personal life is my mindset. I have/had a mindset similar to yours (I'm much younger too) and I've noticed how draining it is to my overall mental health. I'm trying to be more optimistic and positive about things. Life is too short to be depressed and upset about something you spend 1/3 of your waking hours doing.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      I used to have that positive outlook. Work was exciting, and fun. Over time, the reality became impossible to deny.
      - ativzzz 5y ago
        Yup, that's why I'm trying to make the positive mindset a habit and hopefully keep it as I get older. We'll see how it ends up.
        notyourwork 5y ago
        Ignorance can be bliss.
  - newaccount74 5y ago
    > The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. I'm only 35, but until now I feel the opposite is true. I've started to learn C, HTML, CSS, Javascript when I was a teenager more than 20 years ago. The knowledge and skills I learned then are still as relevant today as they were then. Sure, there's flexbox now instead of tables, but the basic idea of HTML vs CSS vs Javascript is still the same, I can still make a basic website for a project in a few hours. Vertically centering something on the screen is still harder than it should be. C now lets me declare variables anywhere, and there's a nicer syntax for initialising structs, but pointers work the same as they did 20 years ago. Knowing C is still as useful today as it was then. My main focus for some years has been Mac desktop development. While a lot of new things was introduced in the last decade, it has all been mostly incremental changes, and even if you skipped a few years of progress catching up isn't that hard. It helps to be aware of some general trends. I've read about async/await years ago when it was introduced in C# I think? and now it's coming in Swift. Sure, it's a slightly different way of thinking about concurrency, but one or two new concepts every 5 years should be doable. Also, you don't need to learn everything. For example, the whole Reactive / Flux technologies with event sources and subscribers sounded really interesting, but I never really was able to get into them (you can probably tell by the fact that this paragraph makes no sense), and I'm doing just fine.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Yep me too. I am 50+ and sharper than ever. Having more than 40 years of programming experience makes it easy for me to solve most software development problems. However I am still learning how to handle difficult personalities. That is still a challenge. I am getting better though.
sidcool 5y ago
Thanks for your response. If I may continue to pick your mind, can you elaborate on what you consider new tech? Do you refer to new languages, frameworks, programming paradigms? Also, what is your suggestion for learning algorithms and data structures?
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  Examples of "new tech": common use of deep learning models in many types of applications and services, higher level web based tools for managing data and infrastructure, mobile devices that can do on-device deep learning model inferencing and sometimes even training, etc. I like and enjoy several programming languages, but I don't consider new languages and frameworks to be paradigm shifting. Still interesting though. As someone else here mentioned, there are so many new tech niches being created; learn one or two. Having work life balance is super important, but I find that skipping watching movies or TV a couple evenings a week gives me plenty of off-work time to learn new stuff. My wife accepts that a few evening a week I don't join her in watching a movie after dinner (we sit in the same room, and she puts on earphones).
  - xupybd 5y ago
    You touched on something I struggle with. If it's not too personal do you mind if I ask how you navigated that discussion with your wife? I hold great hope that one day I'll be able to spend 5-10 hours a week learning.
    - sizzle 5y ago
      Have an honest discussion and don’t make it an argument.
      - clarge1120 5y ago
        The best thing I’ve done for the family is set expectations that I’ll only be working for 15 minutes to an hour. I call it “plodding”. Then I really try to get something done in that time. Ever since I started plodding, and stuck to the promise, my wife has been supportive. She’s even supportive of late nights and weekends if I will avoid locking myself in a room for hours at a time.