6 ms·

I've seen this happen so much with IT people it became a bit of a clichė: Around 35, pure IT is not enough anymore. IT people just drop out. The simple cases

I've seen this happen so much with IT people it became a bit of a clichė: Around 35, pure IT is not enough anymore. IT people just drop out. The simple cases become managers or architects. The more advanced cases start a bakery, go work in a call center. One of the most extreme cases was a very intelligent, very cynical, very anti religion guy who just quit without warning and joined the hare chrisna. We got photos from him in red clothes doing some kind of ritual. Huh? A big part for me is that IT just doesn't learn. Every 5 years, a new generation pops up, invents completely new tooling, and makes all the mistakes from the previous generation. Now your knowledge is obsolete, and after you relearn everything your tooling is worse than where you started. Enter a few years of slow tooling maturisation with a very predictable outcome, after which a new generation pops up, declares the existing stuff too complicated, and reinvent everything again. 35 is 4 or 5 of these cycles, bringing to front the huge wastefull uselessness of it all. Learning your whole life is a nice slogan, but becomes very pointless. The survivors that continue in IT, deal with it somehow. You enter a new cycle knowing it will be change but not much advancement, and don't learn the stack as deep as you used too. You get a life outside IT: Kids, hobbies, social events. You let the youngsters run before you, smile when they do better than your old tech would, and compare with older tools when they get stuck. And you keep some of your tech enthousiasm just for the hell of it.

thenanante 4y ago
Could you give me some examples of those cycles? Genuinely curious what you mean. I started my career just a couple years ago. In my first company, they used 10+ year old tooling and imo it was terrible. A very old legacy mess monolith that made adding features pure torture. Trunk-based development with a "who needs tests" mindset, resulting in horrendously buggy code, 50:50 chance pulling newest version would break something. Several instances of files with over 10k lines of code and deep nesting, absolute nightmare. Absolutely no mindset for performance. They wrote quadratic complexity code in the backend to fetch data because hash-based data structures already seemed too advanced to many of my coworkers and then they wondered why their frontend was so terribly slow. Not that they had a lot of pressure to deliver a great product, because they are / were market leader in their B2B niche. I left within a year. Now I'm working in a company that uses all the latest gitlab CI/CD shenanigans, code reviews and heavy use of unit, integration and end to end tests. Everything is hosted in the cloud with a microservice architecture. We actually need it as we scale to millions of customers and have performance and reliability requirements. The difference is not just the tech stack that was horribly outdated and imo extremely tedious to work with, but also the mentality is completely different. In the first company, you couldn't change anything, there was a strict hierarchy and everything stayed as is because "it works". You totally got the feeling that there's some old people up in the hierarchy that were way too lazy to learn new things and didn't want to endanger their meaning in the company. When I left, I spoke with the Head of HR and he told me that basically all people that leave do so because of the mentioned reasons. So that company drives away motivated talent with their crap mentality. Pay wasn't very good either, but a first job is a first job after all. Now mind you, both companies are a couple decades old, but imo one always kept up and the other didn't. Both companies have 10+ year seniors. Personally, the people in the current company are way more competent and excited about work. Much more fun to work with, I learn more and I absolutely don't get the feeling the tooling is reinvented in any way. It's improved in all possible aspects I could think of and makes the development experience much better.
- hyperman1 4y ago
  OK just to be clear: Even if the constant stack switching can be very tiring, you have to do it. The alternative is deep stagnation, which is much worse. I am also very much pro everything that raises quality like CI, but remember some groups where doing it in the 1970's. I started programming with basic and then DOS and assembly. I have very fond feelings and deep knowledge from both of them, but the UNIX generation rightly looked down on them as 2 turing tarpit hellholes. Onward to C, with Mix, Watcom and DJGPP. Better programs, but you live with some stupid inefficiencies that wouldn't fly in x86 asm. Onward to Win3.1 and Win32. The end user experience is much better, but as a programmer you now have to accept control by the OS over your work. You can't just e.g. write to VRAM anymore. First serious dark clouds appeared for me when I realized Microsoft cynically used us all to extinguish all competition. Politics had entered my IT life. Then came the web. In one way, it was glorious, but programming it in javascript was a serious hellhole. jQuery brought some sanity, but the user friendlyness from windows was almost impossible to reach. Serverside was java, which was dog slow until hotspot appeared. It eats memory like there is no tomorrow. Sun dictated the very shape of your program. There was some war going on between EE which was horribly verbose, and Spring which was geassroots and looked down upon by the architects, as if it smoked weed or something. Whatever camp you chose, pain would follow. Ir you could go to the PHP camp and spend more time debugging than programming . There was some python here in my life, good but dog slower than even Java. Then nodejs. If you thought Java gobbled up memory, you'd just die working with that abomination. End user usability had still not recovered from the win95 days (it never did). You had no type safety with javascript. In fact, every decent tool and technique was sacrificed on the altar of equal back and front end language. Then came frameworks like angular where v2 managed to commut ecosystem suicide, and react. Meanwhile transpulers packers etc managed to undo much of the noneedtocompile of javascript. In the mobile world, 2 massive companies appeared, and their app stores killed any liberty of publication. There us more, but I ran out of time ;-) All of this is quite ranty, partially deserved but there is also quite a lot of good in here. Even so, programming for me was most fun on DOS, and user experience on win95 to xp.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    > I am also very much pro everything that raises quality like CI, but remember some groups where doing it in the 1970's. CI is risky, because it is a great micromanagement tool, just like ticket systems for non-bug tickets. I don't think it is strategic to lure traps for our selves. I believe one should have a setup such that "good" management wont mess our stuff up and not being dependent on having "great" management. It is like agile which only works with great programmers and managers but messes up for most of us. But CI is not nearly as bad or dangerous and have benefits if kept simple.
karmasimida 4y ago
Assuming one got a Master, 35 translates to 10+ years of work experience. I kinda understand why. Programming as a craft, the excitement of mastering it, plateaued around 5 years into this profession. Not saying there isn't specific domain that requires many more years, even life long devotion, but for the generic bunch, that would be it. The challenge is going away, and mundaneness of labor kicks in, and you start questioning yourself, what is the point of all this? For me, I pivoted to some of author's recipes of reading technology history to reignite that romantic aspect, and it does work. Still, I think courage is needed to switch track and makes yourself uncomfortable every now and then, in new fields of tech. I was working in AdTech space, now I am in more pure ML application space, and I am happy I made the jump, and it is pretty rewarding. Regardless, for fellow engineers, and I would say, to embed the curiosity for ever new technology into your belief system is critical, and it takes time to realize curiosity is indeed a blessing rather than a giving.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Plateauing after 5 years? That seems quite early. Maybe something >15 depending on ones capacity to go further and learn more. There is more stuff out there than one could learn in a lifetime. Many decades of learning. And if one does not know what to learn next, just learn a new language and see how concepts one already knows apply there. Or pick up a book of the masters of our craft and work through it. Like for example one could ask oneself: Have I really worked through all of SICP (or insert other great book here)? If not, maybe there is lots of stuff in there to learn. Maybe one plateaus after 5y of mainstream every-noun-a-class and endless-design-patterns-forced-in kind of stuff. I guess I would, if I did not look for more elsewhere. I think such kind of job is also why there is a disillusionment. One suddenly realizes, that at the job one might never apply all the cool things one knows. Then it is up to oneself to either find interesting side-projects, or deal with it in some other way, or quit.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Yes, and then write a blog post like OP, with 3 paragraphs about how terrible and boring and evil the industry is, and the next 20 paragraphs an autobiographical history of every computer they ever owned since they were a child. You know how to recognize a burned out case? The one who's making kombucha, not the one posting on HN claiming they're so burned out.
hurril 4y ago
Haha, are you me?
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  History repeats itself. You see, it has to. Nobody listens.
Ygg2 4y ago
> A big part for me is that IT just doesn't learn. Every 5 years, a new generation pops up, invents completely new tooling, and makes all the mistakes from the previous generation. It doesn't learn, because it's chasing a fad or just considers everything before it crap. As I said, those those that don't understand old systems are doomed to reimplement them.. Badly. As someone approaching this 35 year limit, I never once had this problem. Jobs are kinda meant to suck. If you want enjoyment, start a hobby.
- karmakurtisaani 4y ago
  An older colleague once told me you can only expect two things from your job: money and experience, everything else is extra.
  - xyzzy4747 4y ago
    This sounds pessimistic at first but I 100% agree.
cowsaythrowaway 4y ago
I think that's a really good observation and it aligns with my own experiences to some extent. I started working as a dev/designer at the age of 15 and have spent almost 20 years in the trade. My career progressed fairly quickly, with my first CTO gig at the age of 24, then moving to founding dev/tech-lead roles, which makes me feel super privileged but at the same time worked too well as a distraction from issues in other parts of my life (PTSD, depression). The last 5 years have been a struggle, there are days, _weeks_ when I just can't code the simplest thing. The irony is that I have the tools to build most of the things I want, both technical and product related (design, UX, marketing), but now my brain takes 10x time to apply them and it just feels almost physically painful. At first, it was weird and scary. Therapy and moving from a big tech hub to a small town in a different country helped a lot. But, I feel like I have to re-learn so much because most of my life revolved around IT. I grew up poor and I'm aware of how privileged this sounds, but that's also one of the reasons for my problems: it's hard to make decisions that are good for you and your loved ones if you keep constantly second guessing/judging yourself/overthinking. There are still days I'm terrified of ending up alone and homeless, although I know, rationally, how much I have and how happy I am in my relationships with people. You see, for me "pure IT" was never enough. But, it was a good way of creating a constant stream of problems I could solve, then get rewarded for solving them, rinse and repeat... This includes dopamine (I solved "the <small design or CS> problem"!), a sense of progression ("I can solve more difficult problems now"!). Another issue is that in our trade often it's very hard to see the actual results of our work. I mean, actually, physically interact with people and see their happy faces when we do something for them. At a very basic level, this is something that humans need to keep going. I sometimes mentor or just chat with random people in our trade via "office hours" and this is brought up very often, regardless of age and expertise. On a positive note, I'm aware that with enough work and patience this will get easier, and will make me a better person. Most of the days I feel happy, more than before. At the age of 25 it was easier to work 80-100 h per week to brute force your problems, instead of slowing down and learning how to live with the ape you are. I just think that the nature of our work enables an unhealthy pattern of avoiding problems. It's easy to get lost in it.
- resonious 4y ago
  Yup I definitely fall into that bucket of not really feeling the impact of what I build. It seems like most companies are creating "lesser of two evils" products. Users hate most software. It causes people so much headache because UIs are confusing, bugs occur, simple tasks are painstaking and repetitive. People only use software tools because there's often nothing better or simply because a company forces them to do it. Or maybe it's like, yeah service A is janky and horrible but service B is even worse.
ajmurmann 4y ago
> The simple cases become managers I wonder about this one. I became a manager because the organizational problems can be so frustrating and I wanted to fix them. However, what you get is pretty much only the aspects of tech work that the author calls out as burning people. A few days ago I wrote a simple Rails app for a young relative's hobby. Most satisfaction I've had with anything related to tech in years.
- WJW 4y ago
  > I became a manager because the organizational problems can be so frustrating and I wanted to fix them. The biggest "carrot" held out to idealistic people wanting to become a manager is exactly this: the (fake) opportunity to "fix things". Only after you've become a manager does it become apparent that long-lasting problems are long-lasting for a reason and that none of the choices low-level managers are allowed to make can meaningfully move the needle. Sometimes they fall for it a second time, but being a manager of managers is often even worse since now you don't even have direct reports to effect change.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    It's even worse. Even if you made a difference you won't know for certain and you'll mostly hear from people who didn't like what you did. One of the clearest success you can get is avoiding worse shit that would have come to your org. That alone can have a massive impact, many times that of a average IC, but "avoiding worse shit" isn't entirely satisfying. It's just frustrating that it had to be avoided in the first place.
  - feanaro 4y ago
    I've long wondered why we insist on modelling company structure as strict trees / hierarchies. Perhaps there are other classes of graphs which would be better suited in order to avoid such situations?
    - HighlandSpring 4y ago
      Maybe because it's a pretty good fit for the only things that ultimately matter: allocating budget and attributing revenue and PnL
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>Every 5 years, a new generation pops up, invents completely new tooling, This is in general true for life not just IT. The timescales may be more along one generation say between 30 and 50 years.
swader999 4y ago
I went treeplanting one time when I lost it. It was awesome. A lot like this story: https://bivouac.com/ExpPg.asp?ExpId=84 https://bivouac.com/ExpPg.asp?ExpId=84
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unity1001 4y ago
> The simple cases become managers or architects Not at all. As a senior, you note that even if you can do a lot of things - almost everything - right now, you are still just one person. Even if you are a mythical creature that can put out code dozens of times more than others, you note that what you can physically produce is always far behind the possibilities that you can see on the horizon. Then you realize - you need to cooperate and work as teams. For only by collaborating you can make happen all those things that you can envision. Which obviously takes you towards leading people one way or the other.
sfpotter 4y ago
I think it has to do with how boring the thing you're programming is. If you're working on some humdrum mobile or web app, it's hard to stay excited. Making apps that clearly do not need to exist takes its toll. I saw the writing on the wall and got out early. For me the solution was to go back to graduate school. I figured that I would be able to find an application area to work in with some real depth and let that drive the programming, instead of working on something dull where I would need to find my excitement in the programming itself. Now that I've done this (I have my PhD by now), the programming I do is quite dull, but the applications are fascinating. What's more, what I work on now has so much more depth to it compared to programming (I do computational math). To attain technical mastery simply requires dramatically more time and effort than programming. I think in this way the proper balance is restored between the tool and its use---a hammer is simple and understandable, building a house is deep and complicated. My hope is that one day people will have more opportunities to use programming for the powerful computational tool that it is, rather than as a means to make a quick buck.

thenanante 4y ago

Could you give me some examples of those cycles? Genuinely curious what you mean. I started my career just a couple years ago. In my first company, they used 10+ year old tooling and imo it was terrible. A very old legacy mess monolith that made adding features pure torture. Trunk-based development with a "who needs tests" mindset, resulting in horrendously buggy code, 50:50 chance pulling newest version would break something. Several instances of files with over 10k lines of code and deep nesting, absolute nightmare. Absolutely no mindset for performance. They wrote quadratic complexity code in the backend to fetch data because hash-based data structures already seemed too advanced to many of my coworkers and then they wondered why their frontend was so terribly slow. Not that they had a lot of pressure to deliver a great product, because they are / were market leader in their B2B niche. I left within a year. Now I'm working in a company that uses all the latest gitlab CI/CD shenanigans, code reviews and heavy use of unit, integration and end to end tests. Everything is hosted in the cloud with a microservice architecture. We actually need it as we scale to millions of customers and have performance and reliability requirements. The difference is not just the tech stack that was horribly outdated and imo extremely tedious to work with, but also the mentality is completely different. In the first company, you couldn't change anything, there was a strict hierarchy and everything stayed as is because "it works". You totally got the feeling that there's some old people up in the hierarchy that were way too lazy to learn new things and didn't want to endanger their meaning in the company. When I left, I spoke with the Head of HR and he told me that basically all people that leave do so because of the mentioned reasons. So that company drives away motivated talent with their crap mentality. Pay wasn't very good either, but a first job is a first job after all. Now mind you, both companies are a couple decades old, but imo one always kept up and the other didn't. Both companies have 10+ year seniors. Personally, the people in the current company are way more competent and excited about work. Much more fun to work with, I learn more and I absolutely don't get the feeling the tooling is reinvented in any way. It's improved in all possible aspects I could think of and makes the development experience much better.

hyperman1 4y ago
OK just to be clear: Even if the constant stack switching can be very tiring, you have to do it. The alternative is deep stagnation, which is much worse. I am also very much pro everything that raises quality like CI, but remember some groups where doing it in the 1970's. I started programming with basic and then DOS and assembly. I have very fond feelings and deep knowledge from both of them, but the UNIX generation rightly looked down on them as 2 turing tarpit hellholes. Onward to C, with Mix, Watcom and DJGPP. Better programs, but you live with some stupid inefficiencies that wouldn't fly in x86 asm. Onward to Win3.1 and Win32. The end user experience is much better, but as a programmer you now have to accept control by the OS over your work. You can't just e.g. write to VRAM anymore. First serious dark clouds appeared for me when I realized Microsoft cynically used us all to extinguish all competition. Politics had entered my IT life. Then came the web. In one way, it was glorious, but programming it in javascript was a serious hellhole. jQuery brought some sanity, but the user friendlyness from windows was almost impossible to reach. Serverside was java, which was dog slow until hotspot appeared. It eats memory like there is no tomorrow. Sun dictated the very shape of your program. There was some war going on between EE which was horribly verbose, and Spring which was geassroots and looked down upon by the architects, as if it smoked weed or something. Whatever camp you chose, pain would follow. Ir you could go to the PHP camp and spend more time debugging than programming . There was some python here in my life, good but dog slower than even Java. Then nodejs. If you thought Java gobbled up memory, you'd just die working with that abomination. End user usability had still not recovered from the win95 days (it never did). You had no type safety with javascript. In fact, every decent tool and technique was sacrificed on the altar of equal back and front end language. Then came frameworks like angular where v2 managed to commut ecosystem suicide, and react. Meanwhile transpulers packers etc managed to undo much of the noneedtocompile of javascript. In the mobile world, 2 massive companies appeared, and their app stores killed any liberty of publication. There us more, but I ran out of time ;-) All of this is quite ranty, partially deserved but there is also quite a lot of good in here. Even so, programming for me was most fun on DOS, and user experience on win95 to xp.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > I am also very much pro everything that raises quality like CI, but remember some groups where doing it in the 1970's. CI is risky, because it is a great micromanagement tool, just like ticket systems for non-bug tickets. I don't think it is strategic to lure traps for our selves. I believe one should have a setup such that "good" management wont mess our stuff up and not being dependent on having "great" management. It is like agile which only works with great programmers and managers but messes up for most of us. But CI is not nearly as bad or dangerous and have benefits if kept simple.

karmasimida 4y ago

Assuming one got a Master, 35 translates to 10+ years of work experience. I kinda understand why. Programming as a craft, the excitement of mastering it, plateaued around 5 years into this profession. Not saying there isn't specific domain that requires many more years, even life long devotion, but for the generic bunch, that would be it. The challenge is going away, and mundaneness of labor kicks in, and you start questioning yourself, what is the point of all this? For me, I pivoted to some of author's recipes of reading technology history to reignite that romantic aspect, and it does work. Still, I think courage is needed to switch track and makes yourself uncomfortable every now and then, in new fields of tech. I was working in AdTech space, now I am in more pure ML application space, and I am happy I made the jump, and it is pretty rewarding. Regardless, for fellow engineers, and I would say, to embed the curiosity for ever new technology into your belief system is critical, and it takes time to realize curiosity is indeed a blessing rather than a giving.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
Plateauing after 5 years? That seems quite early. Maybe something >15 depending on ones capacity to go further and learn more. There is more stuff out there than one could learn in a lifetime. Many decades of learning. And if one does not know what to learn next, just learn a new language and see how concepts one already knows apply there. Or pick up a book of the masters of our craft and work through it. Like for example one could ask oneself: Have I really worked through all of SICP (or insert other great book here)? If not, maybe there is lots of stuff in there to learn. Maybe one plateaus after 5y of mainstream every-noun-a-class and endless-design-patterns-forced-in kind of stuff. I guess I would, if I did not look for more elsewhere. I think such kind of job is also why there is a disillusionment. One suddenly realizes, that at the job one might never apply all the cool things one knows. Then it is up to oneself to either find interesting side-projects, or deal with it in some other way, or quit.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Yes, and then write a blog post like OP, with 3 paragraphs about how terrible and boring and evil the industry is, and the next 20 paragraphs an autobiographical history of every computer they ever owned since they were a child. You know how to recognize a burned out case? The one who's making kombucha, not the one posting on HN claiming they're so burned out.

hurril 4y ago

Haha, are you me?

082349872349872 4y ago
History repeats itself. You see, it has to. Nobody listens.

Ygg2 4y ago

> A big part for me is that IT just doesn't learn. Every 5 years, a new generation pops up, invents completely new tooling, and makes all the mistakes from the previous generation. It doesn't learn, because it's chasing a fad or just considers everything before it crap. As I said, those those that don't understand old systems are doomed to reimplement them.. Badly. As someone approaching this 35 year limit, I never once had this problem. Jobs are kinda meant to suck. If you want enjoyment, start a hobby.

karmakurtisaani 4y ago
An older colleague once told me you can only expect two things from your job: money and experience, everything else is extra.
- xyzzy4747 4y ago
  This sounds pessimistic at first but I 100% agree.

cowsaythrowaway 4y ago

I think that's a really good observation and it aligns with my own experiences to some extent. I started working as a dev/designer at the age of 15 and have spent almost 20 years in the trade. My career progressed fairly quickly, with my first CTO gig at the age of 24, then moving to founding dev/tech-lead roles, which makes me feel super privileged but at the same time worked too well as a distraction from issues in other parts of my life (PTSD, depression). The last 5 years have been a struggle, there are days, _weeks_ when I just can't code the simplest thing. The irony is that I have the tools to build most of the things I want, both technical and product related (design, UX, marketing), but now my brain takes 10x time to apply them and it just feels almost physically painful. At first, it was weird and scary. Therapy and moving from a big tech hub to a small town in a different country helped a lot. But, I feel like I have to re-learn so much because most of my life revolved around IT. I grew up poor and I'm aware of how privileged this sounds, but that's also one of the reasons for my problems: it's hard to make decisions that are good for you and your loved ones if you keep constantly second guessing/judging yourself/overthinking. There are still days I'm terrified of ending up alone and homeless, although I know, rationally, how much I have and how happy I am in my relationships with people. You see, for me "pure IT" was never enough. But, it was a good way of creating a constant stream of problems I could solve, then get rewarded for solving them, rinse and repeat... This includes dopamine (I solved "the <small design or CS> problem"!), a sense of progression ("I can solve more difficult problems now"!). Another issue is that in our trade often it's very hard to see the actual results of our work. I mean, actually, physically interact with people and see their happy faces when we do something for them. At a very basic level, this is something that humans need to keep going. I sometimes mentor or just chat with random people in our trade via "office hours" and this is brought up very often, regardless of age and expertise. On a positive note, I'm aware that with enough work and patience this will get easier, and will make me a better person. Most of the days I feel happy, more than before. At the age of 25 it was easier to work 80-100 h per week to brute force your problems, instead of slowing down and learning how to live with the ape you are. I just think that the nature of our work enables an unhealthy pattern of avoiding problems. It's easy to get lost in it.

resonious 4y ago
Yup I definitely fall into that bucket of not really feeling the impact of what I build. It seems like most companies are creating "lesser of two evils" products. Users hate most software. It causes people so much headache because UIs are confusing, bugs occur, simple tasks are painstaking and repetitive. People only use software tools because there's often nothing better or simply because a company forces them to do it. Or maybe it's like, yeah service A is janky and horrible but service B is even worse.

ajmurmann 4y ago

> The simple cases become managers I wonder about this one. I became a manager because the organizational problems can be so frustrating and I wanted to fix them. However, what you get is pretty much only the aspects of tech work that the author calls out as burning people. A few days ago I wrote a simple Rails app for a young relative's hobby. Most satisfaction I've had with anything related to tech in years.

WJW 4y ago
> I became a manager because the organizational problems can be so frustrating and I wanted to fix them. The biggest "carrot" held out to idealistic people wanting to become a manager is exactly this: the (fake) opportunity to "fix things". Only after you've become a manager does it become apparent that long-lasting problems are long-lasting for a reason and that none of the choices low-level managers are allowed to make can meaningfully move the needle. Sometimes they fall for it a second time, but being a manager of managers is often even worse since now you don't even have direct reports to effect change.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  It's even worse. Even if you made a difference you won't know for certain and you'll mostly hear from people who didn't like what you did. One of the clearest success you can get is avoiding worse shit that would have come to your org. That alone can have a massive impact, many times that of a average IC, but "avoiding worse shit" isn't entirely satisfying. It's just frustrating that it had to be avoided in the first place.
- feanaro 4y ago
  I've long wondered why we insist on modelling company structure as strict trees / hierarchies. Perhaps there are other classes of graphs which would be better suited in order to avoid such situations?
  - HighlandSpring 4y ago
    Maybe because it's a pretty good fit for the only things that ultimately matter: allocating budget and attributing revenue and PnL

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

>Every 5 years, a new generation pops up, invents completely new tooling, This is in general true for life not just IT. The timescales may be more along one generation say between 30 and 50 years.

swader999 4y ago

I went treeplanting one time when I lost it. It was awesome. A lot like this story: https://bivouac.com/ExpPg.asp?ExpId=84 https://bivouac.com/ExpPg.asp?ExpId=84

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

unity1001 4y ago

> The simple cases become managers or architects Not at all. As a senior, you note that even if you can do a lot of things - almost everything - right now, you are still just one person. Even if you are a mythical creature that can put out code dozens of times more than others, you note that what you can physically produce is always far behind the possibilities that you can see on the horizon. Then you realize - you need to cooperate and work as teams. For only by collaborating you can make happen all those things that you can envision. Which obviously takes you towards leading people one way or the other.

sfpotter 4y ago

I think it has to do with how boring the thing you're programming is. If you're working on some humdrum mobile or web app, it's hard to stay excited. Making apps that clearly do not need to exist takes its toll. I saw the writing on the wall and got out early. For me the solution was to go back to graduate school. I figured that I would be able to find an application area to work in with some real depth and let that drive the programming, instead of working on something dull where I would need to find my excitement in the programming itself. Now that I've done this (I have my PhD by now), the programming I do is quite dull, but the applications are fascinating. What's more, what I work on now has so much more depth to it compared to programming (I do computational math). To attain technical mastery simply requires dramatically more time and effort than programming. I think in this way the proper balance is restored between the tool and its use---a hammer is simple and understandable, building a house is deep and complicated. My hope is that one day people will have more opportunities to use programming for the powerful computational tool that it is, rather than as a means to make a quick buck.