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When you reach a certain age you have to play to your strengths and focus on the things you're good at doing. Sometimes when people hit their midlife crisis, th

• simplestats 5y ago
  There's always a conflict between leveraging your background and optimizing for what is highest pay currently (unless you're really lucky). Neither direction is a guarantee. Certainly we would like a society where a person who follows the latter policy is always able to succeed at it. It's an important signal for where the need is the highest. At some point (hopefully soon..) society will have way too many real estate agents again, and it's better if they go where they are needed rather than toughing it out because they think there are no alternatives at their age.
• leonsegal 5y ago
  l might be wrong,but it almost sounds like you're saying there's no room for middle aged people to switch to coding later in life. There can be many reasons people switch, not necessarily related to a crisis or monetary incentives. We need more coders, so why not let people learn.
  • Zababa 5y ago
    > We need more coders Who is "we" here?
    • leonsegal 5y ago
      How do you mean?
      • Zababa 5y ago
        I'm wondering who is the "we" in the "we need more coders" part of your comment referring to. I can think of a few examples where some people might want more coders, but other might not: 1) Right now coders are in high demand. This means that they cost a lot. Recruiters might want more coders to be able to recruit people easier, companies might want more coders to reduce their price, and have more people working. On the other hand, coders themselves might not want more coders because it may reduce their earnings, and make it harder for them to get jobs. 2) Some people think that more software is good, and therefore we need more people producing it. On the other hand, some people think that "we should be more like engineers" and should gatekeep more, to increase the quality of the software. I'm not supporting either of those idea, just citing examples that I've seen, especially here on HN 3) A country might want more coders in general to increase its economy, especially if it's one where other countries can outsource work to. But on the other hand, it might also not want other countries that have a lower cost of living/salaries to have more coders, so they can keep work for themselves. All of that to say that I'm not sure the sentiment of "we need more coders" is agreed upon by everyone, which is why I'm asking who you were referring to.
        • leonsegal 5y ago
          I agree 'we' is relative, on reflection. I meant in general terms only i.e., the need for more developers will increase as employers start to build more software, which is where I posit things are heading. I could be wrong of course. I slightly regret adding that to my post now, as my main concern was with the over generalisation of the reasons why older people might switch to coding/development. Ironically, I managed to do that myself by assuming the 'we' was agreed as was the need for more developers!
          • jart 5y ago
            Eventually there will be so much software that writing code will need to be automated by machines. GPT-2 is open source and it's able to write computer programs, although not very well. GPT-3 does it better and they give it away for free. So imagine how much more advanced the stuff you have to pay money for is, or the trade secret models. You'd think programmers would move on to a higher-level of abstraction where programmers program the computer programs that do programming. That's probably not going to be the case. For example, take a look at the GPT-2 source code https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py It's only a few hundred lines of code.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• rjewell 5y ago
  > When you reach a certain age you have to play to your strengths and focus on the things you're good at doing. source please