8 ms·

[for the record, I'm 58 & and an active software developer] There are two points I'd like to add: My brain isn't as elastic as a younger programmer's. My brot

[for the record, I'm 58 & and an active software developer] There are two points I'd like to add: My brain isn't as elastic as a younger programmer's. My brother, a software developer close to my age, once said, "It's as if I used to have 20 registers, and now I'm down to 12". I can't keep as much in my head as once. My twenty-something co-worker, Belinda, once remarked, "It takes you a while to read code & understand what it's doing". She was right. Using solely that metric (elasticity), I'd have to say that the forty-year-old version of myself was faster than the fifty-eight-year-old version. The other point I'd like to make is that there's a certain class of developer who has grown tired of developing & learning new skills, but doesn't want to retire. I remember my co-worker Larry would spend far too much time reminiscing about 640k computers and showing pictures of his grand kids. He didn't seem to want to work much. They let him go, and though I liked him personally, I think management made the right decision.

hirundo 4y ago
I'm 59 you young whippersnapper, and one thing I've learned in all those extra months is that my inelastic brain has some useful ruts carved in it, such that I can bang out much code in a fraction of the time that I used to, just because I've done so many similar things before and have grown my toolkit. And it's lower stress/effort work at the same time, almost on autopilot for swaths of it. Maybe I'm at a disadvantage to a young dev in some greenfield on a fresh stack. But I've been in a lot of greenfields and fresh stacks too, and the patterns repeat. That said someday my utility will drop below my cost. I may not _want_ to notice, but my compiler will tell me. I can't lie to the compiler. When my brain can't build any more my commits won't build anymore, it isn't very subtle.
agumonkey 4y ago
What about abstract thinking ? at 23 I used to rush through never ending streams of programming ideas, most of them were shallow if not stupid. I'm "slow" now, but in a "make haste slowly".. I take time to grasp higher level, more precise ideas instead of running head down. The bit about the existential shift in priorities rings true to me. At 20 you dream about mastering the future, at 40 you couldn't care less.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Yup. I think slower, but I go in fewer false directions, create fewer bad designs, and write fewer bugs and maintenance headaches. Overall, I think it's a net win - I'm faster than I was, not because I'm slinging code faster, but because I'm faster at getting to the right code. But, um, could y'all stop changing the procedures on me every week? I ain't got time for that...
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    Oh right, the "random change" is mentally exhausting. Especially when it's fad driven... That's half why I went into math and electronics as a hobby.. a little stabler than programming.
inglor_cz 4y ago
I am soon-to-be 44. I felt the same process creeping on me in my late 30s. Since then, I started experimenting with some OTC drugs (to be concrete: Nicotinamide Riboside, Pterostilbene and Spermidine). It is my impression that the effect has largely gone away. People that I meet after a long time tend to remark that I am noticeably more energetic, too. A combination of NR and Pterostilbene under the name EH301 was recently trialled in Spain for treatment of ALS (yes, that ALS) with remarkably good results [0], though the study was small. A much bigger study is now underway in Norway [1]. If this combo can influence a neurodegenerative disease positively, it may help the brain in general. But I do not want to sound as a huckster for both. This is a huge if and it is possible that I am just another case of a placebo effect. [0] https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/small-trial-eh301-appears-halt-progression-als https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/small-trial-eh30... [1] https://ichgcp.net/clinical-trials-registry/NCT04562831 https://ichgcp.net/clinical-trials-registry/NCT04562831
- secondcoming 4y ago
  I never thought I'd see the day when someone recommends performance enhancing drugs to stay competitive as a software developer.
  - Aromasin 4y ago
    Unless you're being sarcastic, we must work in very different places. I can't tell you how many times I've had discussions with colleagues at different roles about our Nootropics stack.
    - oblio 4y ago
      I guess the world is a big place.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    TBH I wasn't interested in them for my development skills. I was more interested in general effects of NAD+ precursor supplementation. I sometimes hang out with the longevity crowd and try out methods that do not sound too dangerous (intermittent fasting etc.)
UncleOxidant 4y ago
I'm also 58 and still mostly active in software development. I say "mostly" because I did give early retirement a try - it lasted about 2 years and then my current job came along, looked really interesting and here I am. It's not just my brain that's not as elastic - my body isn't so elastic anymore either. I can't sit for more than an hour or so before I've gotta get up and take a foam-roller break. Lots of aches and pains that I'm finding are causing me to lose focus. After ~2 years of not working I found that I didn't much care for it - I needed more purpose or something. Just felt like I was floating along not going anywhere. I think the happy medium would be to work 3 days/week. I could do that indefinitely. Not really be retired and not really be working full time. It would work monetarily as well since the house is nearly paid off and we have no other debt. But software development gigs where you only work 24hrs/week seem to be quite rare.
- jameshush 4y ago
  I have a close friend who had a win from a startup acquisition at 38 paired with just saving his money. He had a similar experience to you with retiring. He said it took him 6 months to realize that he didn't have to work anymore. After about two years he ended up getting married and starting a family and can't see himself ever going back to working. My dad on the other hand worked a normal job and retired at 60, told me it took him about 6 months to accept that he didn't have to work anymore either. As funny as it sounds, I think it just takes time to get used to not working.
  - kqr 4y ago
    Your comments are treating work as some sort of dichotomy. It doesn't exist. There are several reasons to want full-time employment: - Purpose (do something good in the world) - Mental challenge - Physical challenge - Meet people - Earn money - Daily routine - etc. Full-time employment is a popular way to get these desires satisfied, but it's far from the only way. For example, if I would take a sabbatical right now, earning money or meeting people would not be an immediate problem. However, I would miss the mental challenge and doing something good for the world. So I'd likely take up open source contribution. I'd probably do quite a lot of it -- several hours per day. Is it work? No, I don't think people would call it that. Does it do for me many of the things work does for me? Yeah.
JakeAl 4y ago
For males over a certain age, your mental acuity drop may be related to decreasing testosterone levels. Have your levels checked out. Medication may give you back that edge you noticed you are missing.
darreld 4y ago
I'm 65 and started a new job as a programmer a few weeks ago. I can relate to your brain elasticity issues for sure. I am really enjoying the new team and the work is fun but it does take its toll on my brain. By the end of a full day of coding or troubleshooting my brain feels... depleted. By friday I find it more difficult than in the past to quickly remember things. I am doing well in the job and, due to a long career, have experience in a lot of the things they need. I am also still excited about learning new skills and toolsets and I'm in the right place for it. But I do feel that the brain depletion, it feels like I have used something up - glycogen or something, is noticeable. Any OTC recommendations would be appreciated.
- jasfi 4y ago
  I'm 42. I use mental math to stay sharp. Exercise and diet also make a difference.
  - OracB7 4y ago
    Could you elaborate on the mental math part - do you do particular exercises?
    - jasfi 4y ago
      There are a lot of apps available, just search on mental math. I've found that relatively simple arithmetic done repeatedly works well, look for those kinds of apps. About 10-15 mins of these problems per day is enough.
      - Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
        Stupid question, wouldn't coding (keeping the flow of the code in mind), being the same type if exercise?
        jrumbut 4y ago
        For me coding is mostly about memory, math is more about processing.
malloryerik 4y ago
1. "My brain feels slow; I'm lost; must be that I'm not good enough. But I'm 18 and have to suck it up and try harder." Improves and masters self. 2. "My brain feels slow; I'm lost; must be that I'm getting old. Yes, that's it. Nothing to do." Lets go of themself; hello mental muscle loss. 3. "I bombed the exam. I'm just bad at [math, physics, foreign languages, writing, ...], but hey that's life!" Talks themself out of improvement and into a self-image that biases to failure. 4. "I bombed the exam. I'm over the hill so my brain isn't good enough. Oh well, but hey that's life!" Result: ditto. 5. "I bombed on the exam. I'm older, so I've forgotten how to try as hard as I used to. Time to get scrappy." Result: improvement and self-mastery. Now add society. In the younger person a host of coaches, cheerleaders, friends and the dominant social narratives are telling urging them to push themselves further than they knew they could. "You can do it!" And with the old? "Hey, take it easy! Relax. We have low expectations for you--you can't do it--, and anyway we feel uncomfortable telling you what to do so we'll often just ignore you." Without saying there's no such thing as age-related mental decline, I'm just about certain, seeing many older folks, that's it's abused, a self-fulfilling excuse, while in reality the truly age-related decline (as opposed to habit-related) is less important than it's made out to be, and can be deferred a decade or two beyond what many let themselves believe. Similar to a person who can't give up the nice cars, house, clothes, vacations, dinners, in order to start all over again on a new adventure, too many older people have relied for too long on--grown addicted to--the luxuries of accumulated knowledge or seniority that allow them to operate at a broader, more conceptual level. Then, having to return to the pain of detail-oriented, working memory-related tasks feels as challenging as it did when they were youngsters. They were perhaps fresher, also typically more disheveled. Now they've lost the coaches and cheerleaders of youth and gained excuses--"I'm over the hill!"; "I require the dignity of age"--that cripple them. More exercise, healthy lifestyle, consistent effort, trying as hard at self-mastery as they did when they were young strivers and pushed themselves beyond their limits, and not listening to ageist arguments should make up for the lion's share of whatever mental decline is common in older people. They just need to be older strivers. But the studies... Yes, well the studies record people who enjoy the flabby habits of seniority and the results of social bias. Far better to take control of the bias... to have the better, helpful bias.
- graderjs 4y ago
danbmil99 4y ago
For me, the worst scenario is a Zoom call with everyone using pathetic earbud mics or even worse their laptop mic -- and talking a mile a minute, changing the subject before I have a chance to butt in, interrupting each other with memes and non-sequiturs, etc. I think some of this is generational -- the under 30 crowd seems especially hyper-kinetc, almost as if they grew up on a diet of overstimulating media competing viciously for slivers of attention from teenagers addled with drugs to help them cram a bit of marketable information into their saturated brains (er, sorry, to treat their ADHD...) But I've already gone on too long on my personal hobby horse, as we elder fogies are prone to do. Also, get off my lawn
padraic7a 4y ago
Poor Larry. Was that in a 'right to work's state? It's Management's job to manage. It doesn't say much about them that they couldn't find a way to motivate Larry, or to make use of his skills without firing him. Workers aren't going to be as productive when they are pregnant, have young kids, are chronically ill, experience bereavement etc etc Cutting people loose as soon as they are less than optimal is brutal. It makes me very glad that I live somewhere where employment rights (because of a long history of worker's struggles) are a bit more civilised.
triyambakam 4y ago
> My brain isn't as elastic as a younger programmer's. The book Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly proposes that cultures that value and practice mnemonics, like storytelling, has less incidence of this and even often lack the idea that growing old means becoming duller. I've found that my memory is actually very lazy and practicing mnemonics has taken a lot of work, but I've also seen noticeable differences in my trained memory and recall in other areas of life.
makerofthings 4y ago
When I was 25 I could scan a 5000 line file in a few minutes and start making changes. I’m now a lot older than that. It takes me a few days to get completely happy with a file of that size and start making changes. When I was 25, I had a small number of heuristics and gotchas to look for, now I have thousands, it takes longer to consider them. Also, when I was 25 I would make the smallest change I could, now I tidy up the file and do a bit of light refactoring where I can make the code simpler. I serve a different purpose in the code now and I think it’s a more valuable one.
- jseban 4y ago
  > When I was 25, I had a small number of heuristics and gotchas to look for, now I have thousands, it takes longer to consider them. Exactly! You have a much more advanced thinking process, that will let you avoid a lot of mistakes, and let you be much faster in the long run/on average, only seemingly slow and sluggish at the beginning, because you don't jump to conclusions anymore.
jseban 4y ago
> "It takes you a while to read code & understand what it's doing". She was right. Yeah but the young inexperienced people are also overconfident and assume they understand things, when they actually don't, jump to conclusions and waste a lot of time coding themselves into a corner, before they realise: AH! Now I actually understand what the problem is! Back to square one. A more experienced person has made this mistake enough times, to understand that it's worth spending the time it takes to actually understand something, before making changes, and stroking your ego by pretending to be fast, is really counterproductive.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Yeah. The youngster probably writes more code in a given amount of time. That's not the same thing as being more productive.

hirundo 4y ago

I'm 59 you young whippersnapper, and one thing I've learned in all those extra months is that my inelastic brain has some useful ruts carved in it, such that I can bang out much code in a fraction of the time that I used to, just because I've done so many similar things before and have grown my toolkit. And it's lower stress/effort work at the same time, almost on autopilot for swaths of it. Maybe I'm at a disadvantage to a young dev in some greenfield on a fresh stack. But I've been in a lot of greenfields and fresh stacks too, and the patterns repeat. That said someday my utility will drop below my cost. I may not _want_ to notice, but my compiler will tell me. I can't lie to the compiler. When my brain can't build any more my commits won't build anymore, it isn't very subtle.

agumonkey 4y ago

What about abstract thinking ? at 23 I used to rush through never ending streams of programming ideas, most of them were shallow if not stupid. I'm "slow" now, but in a "make haste slowly".. I take time to grasp higher level, more precise ideas instead of running head down. The bit about the existential shift in priorities rings true to me. At 20 you dream about mastering the future, at 40 you couldn't care less.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Yup. I think slower, but I go in fewer false directions, create fewer bad designs, and write fewer bugs and maintenance headaches. Overall, I think it's a net win - I'm faster than I was, not because I'm slinging code faster, but because I'm faster at getting to the right code. But, um, could y'all stop changing the procedures on me every week? I ain't got time for that...
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Oh right, the "random change" is mentally exhausting. Especially when it's fad driven... That's half why I went into math and electronics as a hobby.. a little stabler than programming.

inglor_cz 4y ago

I am soon-to-be 44. I felt the same process creeping on me in my late 30s. Since then, I started experimenting with some OTC drugs (to be concrete: Nicotinamide Riboside, Pterostilbene and Spermidine). It is my impression that the effect has largely gone away. People that I meet after a long time tend to remark that I am noticeably more energetic, too. A combination of NR and Pterostilbene under the name EH301 was recently trialled in Spain for treatment of ALS (yes, that ALS) with remarkably good results [0], though the study was small. A much bigger study is now underway in Norway [1]. If this combo can influence a neurodegenerative disease positively, it may help the brain in general. But I do not want to sound as a huckster for both. This is a huge if and it is possible that I am just another case of a placebo effect. [0] https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/small-trial-eh301-appears-halt-progression-als https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/small-trial-eh30... [1] https://ichgcp.net/clinical-trials-registry/NCT04562831 https://ichgcp.net/clinical-trials-registry/NCT04562831

secondcoming 4y ago
I never thought I'd see the day when someone recommends performance enhancing drugs to stay competitive as a software developer.
- Aromasin 4y ago
  Unless you're being sarcastic, we must work in very different places. I can't tell you how many times I've had discussions with colleagues at different roles about our Nootropics stack.
  - oblio 4y ago
    I guess the world is a big place.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  TBH I wasn't interested in them for my development skills. I was more interested in general effects of NAD+ precursor supplementation. I sometimes hang out with the longevity crowd and try out methods that do not sound too dangerous (intermittent fasting etc.)

UncleOxidant 4y ago

I'm also 58 and still mostly active in software development. I say "mostly" because I did give early retirement a try - it lasted about 2 years and then my current job came along, looked really interesting and here I am. It's not just my brain that's not as elastic - my body isn't so elastic anymore either. I can't sit for more than an hour or so before I've gotta get up and take a foam-roller break. Lots of aches and pains that I'm finding are causing me to lose focus. After ~2 years of not working I found that I didn't much care for it - I needed more purpose or something. Just felt like I was floating along not going anywhere. I think the happy medium would be to work 3 days/week. I could do that indefinitely. Not really be retired and not really be working full time. It would work monetarily as well since the house is nearly paid off and we have no other debt. But software development gigs where you only work 24hrs/week seem to be quite rare.

jameshush 4y ago
I have a close friend who had a win from a startup acquisition at 38 paired with just saving his money. He had a similar experience to you with retiring. He said it took him 6 months to realize that he didn't have to work anymore. After about two years he ended up getting married and starting a family and can't see himself ever going back to working. My dad on the other hand worked a normal job and retired at 60, told me it took him about 6 months to accept that he didn't have to work anymore either. As funny as it sounds, I think it just takes time to get used to not working.
- kqr 4y ago
  Your comments are treating work as some sort of dichotomy. It doesn't exist. There are several reasons to want full-time employment: - Purpose (do something good in the world) - Mental challenge - Physical challenge - Meet people - Earn money - Daily routine - etc. Full-time employment is a popular way to get these desires satisfied, but it's far from the only way. For example, if I would take a sabbatical right now, earning money or meeting people would not be an immediate problem. However, I would miss the mental challenge and doing something good for the world. So I'd likely take up open source contribution. I'd probably do quite a lot of it -- several hours per day. Is it work? No, I don't think people would call it that. Does it do for me many of the things work does for me? Yeah.

JakeAl 4y ago

For males over a certain age, your mental acuity drop may be related to decreasing testosterone levels. Have your levels checked out. Medication may give you back that edge you noticed you are missing.

darreld 4y ago

I'm 65 and started a new job as a programmer a few weeks ago. I can relate to your brain elasticity issues for sure. I am really enjoying the new team and the work is fun but it does take its toll on my brain. By the end of a full day of coding or troubleshooting my brain feels... depleted. By friday I find it more difficult than in the past to quickly remember things. I am doing well in the job and, due to a long career, have experience in a lot of the things they need. I am also still excited about learning new skills and toolsets and I'm in the right place for it. But I do feel that the brain depletion, it feels like I have used something up - glycogen or something, is noticeable. Any OTC recommendations would be appreciated.

jasfi 4y ago
I'm 42. I use mental math to stay sharp. Exercise and diet also make a difference.
- OracB7 4y ago
  Could you elaborate on the mental math part - do you do particular exercises?
  - jasfi 4y ago
    There are a lot of apps available, just search on mental math. I've found that relatively simple arithmetic done repeatedly works well, look for those kinds of apps. About 10-15 mins of these problems per day is enough.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
      Stupid question, wouldn't coding (keeping the flow of the code in mind), being the same type if exercise?
      - jrumbut 4y ago
        For me coding is mostly about memory, math is more about processing.

malloryerik 4y ago

1. "My brain feels slow; I'm lost; must be that I'm not good enough. But I'm 18 and have to suck it up and try harder." Improves and masters self. 2. "My brain feels slow; I'm lost; must be that I'm getting old. Yes, that's it. Nothing to do." Lets go of themself; hello mental muscle loss. 3. "I bombed the exam. I'm just bad at [math, physics, foreign languages, writing, ...], but hey that's life!" Talks themself out of improvement and into a self-image that biases to failure. 4. "I bombed the exam. I'm over the hill so my brain isn't good enough. Oh well, but hey that's life!" Result: ditto. 5. "I bombed on the exam. I'm older, so I've forgotten how to try as hard as I used to. Time to get scrappy." Result: improvement and self-mastery. Now add society. In the younger person a host of coaches, cheerleaders, friends and the dominant social narratives are telling urging them to push themselves further than they knew they could. "You can do it!" And with the old? "Hey, take it easy! Relax. We have low expectations for you--you can't do it--, and anyway we feel uncomfortable telling you what to do so we'll often just ignore you." Without saying there's no such thing as age-related mental decline, I'm just about certain, seeing many older folks, that's it's abused, a self-fulfilling excuse, while in reality the truly age-related decline (as opposed to habit-related) is less important than it's made out to be, and can be deferred a decade or two beyond what many let themselves believe. Similar to a person who can't give up the nice cars, house, clothes, vacations, dinners, in order to start all over again on a new adventure, too many older people have relied for too long on--grown addicted to--the luxuries of accumulated knowledge or seniority that allow them to operate at a broader, more conceptual level. Then, having to return to the pain of detail-oriented, working memory-related tasks feels as challenging as it did when they were youngsters. They were perhaps fresher, also typically more disheveled. Now they've lost the coaches and cheerleaders of youth and gained excuses--"I'm over the hill!"; "I require the dignity of age"--that cripple them. More exercise, healthy lifestyle, consistent effort, trying as hard at self-mastery as they did when they were young strivers and pushed themselves beyond their limits, and not listening to ageist arguments should make up for the lion's share of whatever mental decline is common in older people. They just need to be older strivers. But the studies... Yes, well the studies record people who enjoy the flabby habits of seniority and the results of social bias. Far better to take control of the bias... to have the better, helpful bias.

graderjs 4y ago

danbmil99 4y ago

For me, the worst scenario is a Zoom call with everyone using pathetic earbud mics or even worse their laptop mic -- and talking a mile a minute, changing the subject before I have a chance to butt in, interrupting each other with memes and non-sequiturs, etc. I think some of this is generational -- the under 30 crowd seems especially hyper-kinetc, almost as if they grew up on a diet of overstimulating media competing viciously for slivers of attention from teenagers addled with drugs to help them cram a bit of marketable information into their saturated brains (er, sorry, to treat their ADHD...) But I've already gone on too long on my personal hobby horse, as we elder fogies are prone to do. Also, get off my lawn

padraic7a 4y ago

Poor Larry. Was that in a 'right to work's state? It's Management's job to manage. It doesn't say much about them that they couldn't find a way to motivate Larry, or to make use of his skills without firing him. Workers aren't going to be as productive when they are pregnant, have young kids, are chronically ill, experience bereavement etc etc Cutting people loose as soon as they are less than optimal is brutal. It makes me very glad that I live somewhere where employment rights (because of a long history of worker's struggles) are a bit more civilised.

triyambakam 4y ago

> My brain isn't as elastic as a younger programmer's. The book Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly proposes that cultures that value and practice mnemonics, like storytelling, has less incidence of this and even often lack the idea that growing old means becoming duller. I've found that my memory is actually very lazy and practicing mnemonics has taken a lot of work, but I've also seen noticeable differences in my trained memory and recall in other areas of life.

makerofthings 4y ago

When I was 25 I could scan a 5000 line file in a few minutes and start making changes. I’m now a lot older than that. It takes me a few days to get completely happy with a file of that size and start making changes. When I was 25, I had a small number of heuristics and gotchas to look for, now I have thousands, it takes longer to consider them. Also, when I was 25 I would make the smallest change I could, now I tidy up the file and do a bit of light refactoring where I can make the code simpler. I serve a different purpose in the code now and I think it’s a more valuable one.

jseban 4y ago
> When I was 25, I had a small number of heuristics and gotchas to look for, now I have thousands, it takes longer to consider them. Exactly! You have a much more advanced thinking process, that will let you avoid a lot of mistakes, and let you be much faster in the long run/on average, only seemingly slow and sluggish at the beginning, because you don't jump to conclusions anymore.

jseban 4y ago

> "It takes you a while to read code & understand what it's doing". She was right. Yeah but the young inexperienced people are also overconfident and assume they understand things, when they actually don't, jump to conclusions and waste a lot of time coding themselves into a corner, before they realise: AH! Now I actually understand what the problem is! Back to square one. A more experienced person has made this mistake enough times, to understand that it's worth spending the time it takes to actually understand something, before making changes, and stroking your ego by pretending to be fast, is really counterproductive.

LorenPechtel 4y ago
Yeah. The youngster probably writes more code in a given amount of time. That's not the same thing as being more productive.