8 ms·

I started programming at 10 and now I'm 50, and right now it feels like I've reached this point -- it's boring, I have trouble keeping up, I feel the things wor

I started programming at 10 and now I'm 50, and right now it feels like I've reached this point -- it's boring, I have trouble keeping up, I feel the things work lets me work on are not important. Interesting work goes to younger colleagues. The problem is, I have a family and finding fulfilling work that you have no experience in, in this country, at 50, is close to impossible. So for now I consider myself lucky and try to rediscover the fun things in programming.

pjmlp 2y ago
Similar age point, the problem is not keeping up, is fighting the continuous push to management, which I don't plan to ever do, unless forced by life circunstances. It appears that the only path left for us in many European countries, is to go freelancer, and I vouch for the same problem regarding skills, forget about having Github repos, or open source contributions, if the technology company X is looking for isn't the one we haved used in the last 5 years or so on day job.
- idostuff 2y ago
  I'm a European in my late forties and have been a freelancer for the last five years but I find it harder and harder to motivate myself to continue working. What really takes all joy out of working as a software engineer these days for me are the endless Scrum ceremonies almost all companies in my area have embraced. In the old days (say until ~7-8 yrs ago) I didn't have to attend very many meetings but of those I had to go to most were useful/necessary. These days I could probably count the useful meetings I attend in a year on one hand but the amount of Scrum-worship-meetings per week requires two hands. The same amount of actual work I could do in a week in the old days would now take several months because it needs to be planned in detail. And no, not any technical detail, but rather discussions on how to divide it into stories but without doing any proper technical analysis and then straight ahead to story point guesstimates, yay! Then after a brief period of actual coding it's stuck in code review for weeks because no one will look at a PR unless prodded with a stick. While I do think that code reviews can some times be beneficial, most of the time they are (in my experience unfortunately) pretty useless. Most comments (and I have to admit I'm guilty to this as well) are more bike-shedding than bug-preventing. Complex bugs are rarely found in code-reviews in my experience. While these are my experiences during the last 7-8 years or so, it's more or less the same on all the half a dozen companies (or so) I've worked for during that period (which is also a very big reason why I've worked on half a dozen companies in that period).
  - intelVISA 2y ago
    Tech became too profitable to be left to "those nerds" so now you have very bloated orgs. Though a freelancer should be able to sidestep the grifters unless you're selling yourself as an employee for some reason.
    - idostuff 2y ago
      Yeah, my first year as a freelancer was quite sweet actually. Then came the pandemic and me and my spouse got ourselves a vacation house as we couldn't travel any more. While this was a great relief for our mental health during the pandemic, it meant a much higher mortgage so I needed the more stable income.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Doing software right will require a lot of planning, irrespective of whether that planning occurs up front or as you go. If you plan more up front, that will eliminate a whole lot of guesswork when the time to do the programming comes. You need systems analysts -- generalists who understand the business and work well with people -- to come in and characterize, in detail, how the business currently works in terms of systems and subsystems, and then propose and design new systems, again to a high level of detail. Once that's done, inasmuch as you need software, producing the software is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine. Unfortunately, modern methods are basically just institutionalized guesswork: this is what Agile is all about. It's a methodology designed by programmers for programmers, in order to bamboozle management and inflate the programmers' own sense of self-importance. The correct way to design a business's internal systems, including but not limited to its software, appears to have been forgotten, except a pastiche of it lives on as a strawman called "Waterfall" for Agilistas to take down.
    - bartimus 2y ago
      > is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine. This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected. That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it. You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on. Especially with larger corporations there's still so much potential for automation. Yet what we see is a big fragmented mess. Systems and subsystems that are poorly integrated. Exactly the car you'd expect that was designed in PowerPoint by non-engineers.
- FpUser 2y ago
  I am 63. Canada based. Have no problems keeping up with tech. I am on my own since 2000 and mostly develop new products for various clients. Have couple of product for myself that bring some dosh. The range is very wide. Microcontrollers, Enterprise Backends, Desktop, Multimedia, Browser based, etc. etc. It is not programming per se that keeps me going (I find it boring enough) but designing systems and interactions from scratch and then watching it work.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I'm a bit older, I don't really feel trouble keeping up but looking at the landscape it's just not that interesting anymore. So many "new" ideas are actually old ideas but the people pushing them are too young to know that. I don't have any doubt in my ability to learn new languages and frameworks, but running in that hamster wheel just gets boring after a while.
- altdataseller 2y ago
  What are some examples of new ideas that are old?
  - tra3 2y ago
    Watching web tech evolve is a good example. So much churn rebuilding the same thing over and over.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      And never once reaching parity with desktop UI frameworks. Not even close.
      - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
        Web frameworks barely even abstract much. You still spend so much time marshaling things in and out of strings everywhere, and cramming information into URLs. Mind-numbing makework, really.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Lambdas (in the cloud): see CGI scripts and inetd. Containers: see BSD jails, Solaris zones. WASM: see JVM and Smalltalk VM. Async / futures / actors: see Erlang, Lua, Oz. The cool type system of Typescript: see OCaml and Haskell. Numpy: see APL. Through the list above, there's usually a 20 to 40-year gap between the first availability and the turning into "new hotness".
OnlyMortal 2y ago
I’m 55. Started as a 6502 cracker on the C64. I still get enjoyment out of some coding - C++ on Linux for enterprise applications - but I do miss the “magic”.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  These two perspectives are not incompatible. 49 here and still love programming. But only discovered that after quitting my Google job and spending a year working on my own things. Then housework wasn't getting done because I was writing code instead, and I realized I just love doing it, still, and I'm a far far better programmer than I ever was 20 years ago. I can do things I only dreamt of back then. And faster! but that's not the same thing as enjoying writing the dreck that many employers want, and keeping up with their endless stack of messy JIRA issues, planning meetings, poor design docs, and management shenanigans....
  - nine_k 2y ago
    I sometimes think that big corporations pay more because the actual work there sucks more for an engineer (likely to a manager or a sales, too).
- dqh 2y ago
  Are you involved in the still-thriving C64 demo scene at all? Possible way to reconnect with the magic if not. Especially by attending (in-person, ideally) one of the many demo parties around the world. There are also parallels with embedded device and FPGA work that I personally find thrilling. Plus we on the VICE (open source Commodore emulator) team are always looking for devs.
  - OnlyMortal 2y ago
    I bought a C64 and SD card a few years ago. I enjoyed running up a few technical masterpieces - like DropZone - but the gaming interest has waned. I don’t code 6502 nowadays but I’m active on r/c64.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
The thing is ... The industry needs us. It's making a mess all over and valorizing complexity and novelty. Constantly. Programmers with experience in our age range have, I think, a better sense of how to manage this and encourage simplicity (partially out of necessity). But age and novelty bias in our industry means this knowledge doesn't pass on. It's tough to tell younger engineers that have cut their teeth swimming in intricacies and edge cases and integration nightmares and constantly surfing on the edge of chaos, and managing it, that they're likely contributing to the problem, not fixing it. But someone needs to. I can't remember details like I used to, things mark&sweep out of my brain much faster they used to. (Probably not just because I'm older but because as a parent, home owner, and spouse... I just have a lot to manage on top of it.) But.. really... a good system, a well-built system ... should be resilient to that, and people with experience.. that's hopefully what we build.
- alemanek 2y ago
  I have been lucky enough to have been the youngest person on every team until my mid 30s. I worked with some truly gifted engineers, who had almost no ego, over the course of my career they just were much older than me. When I reflect I do cringe a bit at what I was zealous about and things I took way too far. But, I do think the discussion, sometimes debate, around the fancy/new vs tried/true resulted in much better results. Now that I am old, but not that old, the younger engineers who are passionately discovering new tools and “new” design patterns keep me interested in software development. Being able to share where things come from then we can compare/contrast together. It is rarely a straight copy and it’s fun to see how things get better/worse with reinvention. So, I think trying to get a mix of ages on a team is really beneficial. Passionate young engineers help prevent the old engineers from getting too jaded.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    I too was always the youngest person on every team... until I wasn't, and it seemed like I went from youngest to oldest in a blink and I still can't figure out how that can happen. I got into the industry during the .com boom with no degree, without finishing university, so kind of jumped the queue, age-wise, I guess. And yes, I often cringe in remembrance of past-self. I cringe at present self, too, though :-)
irrational 2y ago
I’m in a similar positions (in my 50s with a family to support). For the most part I can get my boring corporate work done fairly quickly. Then I spend some time each day working on personal programming projects where I get my true satisfaction.
dheera 2y ago
For personal projects I make heavy use of LLMs now and coding is still fun when I do it with the latest and greatest tools. I'm about 5X as productive as I would be if I had to crank out code myself. I'm used to verifying code with a compiler/interpreter and a unit test -- not by going through my code line by line and declaring to an interviewer "yes I think it's correct". My way of doing things is to just run the damn thing with the right tests and it will tell me if something is wrong. Unfortunately job interviews these days are still hellbent on whiteboarding Leetcode problems. I'm past that. Unfortunately they aren't. It's this kind of BS -- not being allowed to use the best tools that exist -- that makes me not want to code for work anymore.

pjmlp 2y ago

Similar age point, the problem is not keeping up, is fighting the continuous push to management, which I don't plan to ever do, unless forced by life circunstances. It appears that the only path left for us in many European countries, is to go freelancer, and I vouch for the same problem regarding skills, forget about having Github repos, or open source contributions, if the technology company X is looking for isn't the one we haved used in the last 5 years or so on day job.

idostuff 2y ago
I'm a European in my late forties and have been a freelancer for the last five years but I find it harder and harder to motivate myself to continue working. What really takes all joy out of working as a software engineer these days for me are the endless Scrum ceremonies almost all companies in my area have embraced. In the old days (say until ~7-8 yrs ago) I didn't have to attend very many meetings but of those I had to go to most were useful/necessary. These days I could probably count the useful meetings I attend in a year on one hand but the amount of Scrum-worship-meetings per week requires two hands. The same amount of actual work I could do in a week in the old days would now take several months because it needs to be planned in detail. And no, not any technical detail, but rather discussions on how to divide it into stories but without doing any proper technical analysis and then straight ahead to story point guesstimates, yay! Then after a brief period of actual coding it's stuck in code review for weeks because no one will look at a PR unless prodded with a stick. While I do think that code reviews can some times be beneficial, most of the time they are (in my experience unfortunately) pretty useless. Most comments (and I have to admit I'm guilty to this as well) are more bike-shedding than bug-preventing. Complex bugs are rarely found in code-reviews in my experience. While these are my experiences during the last 7-8 years or so, it's more or less the same on all the half a dozen companies (or so) I've worked for during that period (which is also a very big reason why I've worked on half a dozen companies in that period).
- intelVISA 2y ago
  Tech became too profitable to be left to "those nerds" so now you have very bloated orgs. Though a freelancer should be able to sidestep the grifters unless you're selling yourself as an employee for some reason.
  - idostuff 2y ago
    Yeah, my first year as a freelancer was quite sweet actually. Then came the pandemic and me and my spouse got ourselves a vacation house as we couldn't travel any more. While this was a great relief for our mental health during the pandemic, it meant a much higher mortgage so I needed the more stable income.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Doing software right will require a lot of planning, irrespective of whether that planning occurs up front or as you go. If you plan more up front, that will eliminate a whole lot of guesswork when the time to do the programming comes. You need systems analysts -- generalists who understand the business and work well with people -- to come in and characterize, in detail, how the business currently works in terms of systems and subsystems, and then propose and design new systems, again to a high level of detail. Once that's done, inasmuch as you need software, producing the software is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine. Unfortunately, modern methods are basically just institutionalized guesswork: this is what Agile is all about. It's a methodology designed by programmers for programmers, in order to bamboozle management and inflate the programmers' own sense of self-importance. The correct way to design a business's internal systems, including but not limited to its software, appears to have been forgotten, except a pastiche of it lives on as a strawman called "Waterfall" for Agilistas to take down.
  - bartimus 2y ago
    > is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine. This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected. That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it. You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on. Especially with larger corporations there's still so much potential for automation. Yet what we see is a big fragmented mess. Systems and subsystems that are poorly integrated. Exactly the car you'd expect that was designed in PowerPoint by non-engineers.
FpUser 2y ago
I am 63. Canada based. Have no problems keeping up with tech. I am on my own since 2000 and mostly develop new products for various clients. Have couple of product for myself that bring some dosh. The range is very wide. Microcontrollers, Enterprise Backends, Desktop, Multimedia, Browser based, etc. etc. It is not programming per se that keeps me going (I find it boring enough) but designing systems and interactions from scratch and then watching it work.

SoftTalker 2y ago

I'm a bit older, I don't really feel trouble keeping up but looking at the landscape it's just not that interesting anymore. So many "new" ideas are actually old ideas but the people pushing them are too young to know that. I don't have any doubt in my ability to learn new languages and frameworks, but running in that hamster wheel just gets boring after a while.

altdataseller 2y ago
What are some examples of new ideas that are old?
- tra3 2y ago
  Watching web tech evolve is a good example. So much churn rebuilding the same thing over and over.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    And never once reaching parity with desktop UI frameworks. Not even close.
    - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      Web frameworks barely even abstract much. You still spend so much time marshaling things in and out of strings everywhere, and cramming information into URLs. Mind-numbing makework, really.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Lambdas (in the cloud): see CGI scripts and inetd. Containers: see BSD jails, Solaris zones. WASM: see JVM and Smalltalk VM. Async / futures / actors: see Erlang, Lua, Oz. The cool type system of Typescript: see OCaml and Haskell. Numpy: see APL. Through the list above, there's usually a 20 to 40-year gap between the first availability and the turning into "new hotness".

OnlyMortal 2y ago

I’m 55. Started as a 6502 cracker on the C64. I still get enjoyment out of some coding - C++ on Linux for enterprise applications - but I do miss the “magic”.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
These two perspectives are not incompatible. 49 here and still love programming. But only discovered that after quitting my Google job and spending a year working on my own things. Then housework wasn't getting done because I was writing code instead, and I realized I just love doing it, still, and I'm a far far better programmer than I ever was 20 years ago. I can do things I only dreamt of back then. And faster! but that's not the same thing as enjoying writing the dreck that many employers want, and keeping up with their endless stack of messy JIRA issues, planning meetings, poor design docs, and management shenanigans....
- nine_k 2y ago
  I sometimes think that big corporations pay more because the actual work there sucks more for an engineer (likely to a manager or a sales, too).
dqh 2y ago
Are you involved in the still-thriving C64 demo scene at all? Possible way to reconnect with the magic if not. Especially by attending (in-person, ideally) one of the many demo parties around the world. There are also parallels with embedded device and FPGA work that I personally find thrilling. Plus we on the VICE (open source Commodore emulator) team are always looking for devs.
- OnlyMortal 2y ago
  I bought a C64 and SD card a few years ago. I enjoyed running up a few technical masterpieces - like DropZone - but the gaming interest has waned. I don’t code 6502 nowadays but I’m active on r/c64.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

The thing is ... The industry needs us. It's making a mess all over and valorizing complexity and novelty. Constantly. Programmers with experience in our age range have, I think, a better sense of how to manage this and encourage simplicity (partially out of necessity). But age and novelty bias in our industry means this knowledge doesn't pass on. It's tough to tell younger engineers that have cut their teeth swimming in intricacies and edge cases and integration nightmares and constantly surfing on the edge of chaos, and managing it, that they're likely contributing to the problem, not fixing it. But someone needs to. I can't remember details like I used to, things mark&sweep out of my brain much faster they used to. (Probably not just because I'm older but because as a parent, home owner, and spouse... I just have a lot to manage on top of it.) But.. really... a good system, a well-built system ... should be resilient to that, and people with experience.. that's hopefully what we build.

alemanek 2y ago
I have been lucky enough to have been the youngest person on every team until my mid 30s. I worked with some truly gifted engineers, who had almost no ego, over the course of my career they just were much older than me. When I reflect I do cringe a bit at what I was zealous about and things I took way too far. But, I do think the discussion, sometimes debate, around the fancy/new vs tried/true resulted in much better results. Now that I am old, but not that old, the younger engineers who are passionately discovering new tools and “new” design patterns keep me interested in software development. Being able to share where things come from then we can compare/contrast together. It is rarely a straight copy and it’s fun to see how things get better/worse with reinvention. So, I think trying to get a mix of ages on a team is really beneficial. Passionate young engineers help prevent the old engineers from getting too jaded.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  I too was always the youngest person on every team... until I wasn't, and it seemed like I went from youngest to oldest in a blink and I still can't figure out how that can happen. I got into the industry during the .com boom with no degree, without finishing university, so kind of jumped the queue, age-wise, I guess. And yes, I often cringe in remembrance of past-self. I cringe at present self, too, though :-)

irrational 2y ago

I’m in a similar positions (in my 50s with a family to support). For the most part I can get my boring corporate work done fairly quickly. Then I spend some time each day working on personal programming projects where I get my true satisfaction.

dheera 2y ago

For personal projects I make heavy use of LLMs now and coding is still fun when I do it with the latest and greatest tools. I'm about 5X as productive as I would be if I had to crank out code myself. I'm used to verifying code with a compiler/interpreter and a unit test -- not by going through my code line by line and declaring to an interviewer "yes I think it's correct". My way of doing things is to just run the damn thing with the right tests and it will tell me if something is wrong. Unfortunately job interviews these days are still hellbent on whiteboarding Leetcode problems. I'm past that. Unfortunately they aren't. It's this kind of BS -- not being allowed to use the best tools that exist -- that makes me not want to code for work anymore.