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I live my life a quarter century at a time
- jpm_sd 2y agoGreat story, and a thought-provoking title. I LLOLed at "We’ll just tell Steve you did move." I'm 45, so I'll mark my 2nd quarter-century in the not-too-distant future. Very approximately, so far: 0-25: learning 25-50: doing 50-75: TBD
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago75-100: Hopefully not dead.
- jpm_sd 2y agoDepends on how 50-75 goes!
- BadHumans 2y agoI'm a couple years into that range and I'm not dead yet! Only 90% of a quarter-century to go!
- nine_k 2y agoNot dead but disabled and dimwit, an annoyance to those who used to love the person you previously were, likely also short on money all the misery which that entails? No, this is seriously worse than death to me. Either it's a life worth living, or forced shutdown for me, while I still have a say.
- candidafighter2 2y ago[flagged]
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoWow - what a bleak answer. You can't imagine being healthy at 75? Most of my family members 75+ are still doing quite well. My great grandma lived to 99 and wasn't particularly unhealthy until 98. My mom's best friend's dad is 98 now, and was in pretty good health until 96. None of them were poor and burdens on society.
- nine_k 2y agoOf course it's best to stay healthy at 75 and beyond! My bleak answer is a refutation of the idea that merely "staying alive" is a goal. Staying physically alive is not enough.
- Gualdrapo 2y ago> I LLOLed at "We’ll just tell Steve you did move." It made me remember about that rumor of Musk firing people at random, but afterwards their immediate superiors just make them to move to another office whatsoever - Musk won't remember the next time he'd be there.
- turnsout 2y agoThey told the same exact yarn about Steve back in the day. I think both are probably exaggerated.
- codazoda 2y agoI worked at Iomega (Zip Drive) from 1994 to 1998. The VP was rumored to fire people on the spot for the smallest thing. One day we worked an all nighter. The entire department. The next day we were still there. Having solved the problem, most of us were asleep at our desks. The VP made an unannounced visit and walked through the office. None of us noticed him. He walked to my bosses bosses office and asked him to assemble us in the meeting room. He walked into the meeting, said he was impressed with how hard we were working, pointing out that our heads were down in deep thought. Then he left. These days, I think he was trolling us. I got to know him quite well later in my career. I never saw him fire anyone.
- knuckleheadsmif 2y agoMusk firing people at random was not an exaggeration. My friend was head of all software at Tesla for the original car and much of the Model S development. Musk would routinely fire random folks in his department and he’d have to go to musk to get it undone. Often he had to put his job on the line threading to quit if he did not change his mind. Eventually musk took him up on it and my friend quit.
- jwr 2y agoThat timescale… got me thinking. In my case it was closer to: 0-25: dicking around, with some incidental learning 25-35: learning how one gets screwed in business deals (by getting screwed in business deals) 35-40: dicking around pretending to work and thinking this is called "startups" 40-50: actually doing stuff, working on meaningful things that people pay for and making a good living off that I am looking forward to the future :-)
- y1n0 2y agoYou’ve peaked. The rest is just the same story in reverse.
- j45 2y agoOr you can never stop peaking and growing in different ways :)
- jwr 2y agoThat is certainly possible, I don't know yet. But what I have noticed is that it is only past 40 that I started doing things that matter, and I learned to recognize things that do not need doing or that should not be done. This goes across the spectrum: from knowing what to do (and more importantly what NOT to spend time on) to build a business that earns money, to avoiding jumping onto the latest and greatest JavaScript framework. Incidentally, one amusing side effect is that I tend to disagree with >90% of HN commenters and often regret posting my comments, because I get downvoted or criticized into oblivion. I might of course be wrong. But then again, when I look at the depressing comments even in this discussion, or at comments from people worrying about their job, securing income, etc, and compare this to my situation, which I've ended up in by following my own compass — I stop worrying, take a deep breath and continue to do my thing :-)
- bitwize 2y agoI'm 47. 50+ is looking a lot like "struggling to run the red queen's race to keep my wife and furbabies safe, sheltered, and provided for, while watching the eventual deterioration of my body into uselessness and decrepitude begin, and watching ageism diminish my opportunities in the field". Affordable rejuvenation therapy in the next couple of decades is pretty much my only hope. Maybe then I could claw back another decade or two of vigorous life with my wife with greater wisdom than I had the first time around.
- purple-leafy 2y agoHa for me its been: 0-25: Arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, delusions, boring normal person 25-50: Obsessive learning/study, application, and passion, finding myself 50-75: Not there yet I just turned 30 and I'm having a blast learning graphics and audio programming, mostly in C! Found my passion, raycasting, audio engineering, and building desktop software
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoYeah the only thing i dont love about the framing is that it implies you cant still be in the learning phase later in life. Neuroplasticity can be encouraged and cultivated.
- interludead 2y agoLearning has no expiration date
- peterlada 2y agoOr as Shakespeare would have put it: 0-25: Act I 24-50: Act II 50-75: Act III, the final act.
- dasloop 2y agoI`m pretty sure that most of us will be alive after that final act ;)
- scarface_74 2y agoFor me: 0-22 - I’m someone else’s responsibility - graduated college degree in CS 22-36 - shuffled aimlessly between two meaningless jobs, a horrible mistake of a marriage (and divorce), got into real estate too heavily and the crash of 2008, taught fitness classes on the side as my only outlet. 36-46 - got remarried and became an instant father to a 9 and 14, rebuilt my career from scratch and hopped between 5 jobs, got my finances under control after walking away from 5 mortgages, built a strong marriage and both (step)sons graduated. “Retired my wife” when she was 44. 46 - present - transitioned into consulting, got first and only job at BigTech, (working remotely cloud consulting department), moved permanently into what was a vacation home in Florida, and start traveling extensively post Covid including doing the digital nomad thing. Left BigTech and enjoying a nice balanced life with my wife while I work remotely and she enjoys her passion projects.
- VoidWhisperer 2y agoWhat does 'retired my wife' mean in this context?
- asdf6969 2y agoShe’s unemployed and he pays for her lifestyle
- scarface_74 2y agoThe official definition of “unemployed” is you are out of work and looking for a job. Honestly, though her spending money was a matter of selling 2 shares of AMZN pre split every six months when I was getting RSUs. We cut our fixed expenses dramatically after Covid and our younger son graduated, downsizing and moving to a state tax free state.
- joseda-hg 2y ago"not engaged in a gainful occupation"[1] "not having a job that provides money"[2] Maybe not official as in dictionary definition, but official as in political / statistical lingo? [1] Kagi's response provided by WordsAPI, I'm not sure if linking a technically paywalled would be the reasonable thing https://kagi.com/search?q=unemployed+meaning https://kagi.com/search?q=unemployed+meaning [2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unemployed https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unemploy...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway657656 2y agosuggested edit: 0-25: learning 25-50: earning 50-75: returning
- sudhirj 2y agoOld Hindu philosphies have a similar split. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80%C5%9Brama_(stage) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80%C5%9Brama_(stage) 0-25y grow and study 25-50y develop your household, your family, your community and gain wealth (non-extractive, provide value). 50y-75y hand over all worldly things to the next generation, advise, teach and help those around you. Focus on your spiritual enlightenment. 75y- renounce the world and disappear into the forest as a monk / hermit.
- beebmam 2y agoI hope more people read comments like these and ask themselves: "What warrants these life suggestions? Are they justified? What would make them justified? What alternatives are there?"
- apocadam 2y agoIndeed, why wait till 50 to start giving back. Edit: Not talking purely about financially giving back, but also volunteering your time.
- joseda-hg 2y agoThere's an argument to holding on X money will let you make more money, therefore making your actual contributions larger / more valuable You can more easily invest your second million than your first (Because you probably need that (Or at least a portion of that to live) There's also no significant reason to start earlier (or later), unless you factor in dying as your stopping point, worthwhile causes aren't going anywhere
- jpm_sd 2y agoBecause by then you've mostly finished spending money on raising your own children.
- sincarne 2y agoI turn 49 tomorrow, and my kid’s next birthday will be her 11th. I have a lot more spending on her ahead!
- kamaal 2y agoI hope there was something like a fun quarter some where in there. Perhaps whatever we might call it. 0 - death -> Doing things. This is just how it unfolds.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoJust turned 50. Unfortunately I already feel like a theme of 50-75 is "forgetting." I remember very well the stuff I learned from 0-25 but damned if I remember last month.
- neilv 2y ago[flagged]
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoPretty sure your potential future employers are not reading my self-deprecating humour on HN before considering your application.
- neilv 2y agoYC started by funding 20 year-olds with no experience, and telling them they were the best people to be doing startups. We know that our field already has a lot of age discrimination. Why reinforce that message with grassroots chatter that impressionable new startup founders and young engineers will see on HN? AFAIK, representatives of other discriminated-against groups aren't coming to HN to voice silly negative stereotypes directly related to workplace performance.
- candidafighter2 2y ago[flagged]
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoAnyone who can’t see the value in hiring someone with some wisdom is really damn stupid imo. Easily worth it even under a cynical, money-focused outlook.
- ronyeh 2y agoDenzel’s Learn, Earn, Return. https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx1T-qoilkYC6vZ48N8US2aM9nHiFTq2IT?si=6zSACOrd_RE0Fy4u https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx1T-qoilkYC6vZ48N8US2aM9nHiFTq2I...
- safety1st 2y agoI think it's interesting that everyone's timeline here stops at 75, meanwhile we're about to inaugurate a 78 year old President, who is replacing an 82 year old President. As much as everyone loves to hate these guys, they're the most powerful men in the world and they clearly didn't get there by fading into retirement from the age of 50 onward. I guess it depends on what you want in life but I wouldn't mind taking a hint from them. You clearly don't need to stop when you're old. For some, life appears to be a continual doubling down for higher and higher stakes. I'm in my mid 40s and as my resources expand all I want to do is ante up and wrestle with bigger demons. Every decade for me is one more chance, maybe the last, to reclaim the stolen aspirations of my youth. The ticker will give out someday, but until then I don't want to ever stop. I'm the healthiest and probably also the angriest I've been in 20 years. Whatever else may transpire I hope to be a bit like those croaking old fuckers and never go gently.
- yzydserd 2y ago0-25: learning 25-50: doing 50-75: enjoying 75-100: leaving
- leoc 2y ago> Fiche bliain ag fás, > Fiche bliain faoi bhláth, > Fiche bliain ag meath > Agus fiche bliain gur cuma ann no as. "Twenty years growing, Twenty years in bloom, Twenty years in decline, And twenty years when it makes no difference if you're there or gone."
- generic92034 2y ago> And twenty years when it makes no difference if you're there or gone. That does not seem to picture today's reality all that well, considering that most power in the world is concentrated in the hands of 60+ year old people.
- pchristensen 2y agoSome describe the three phases of your career as learn, earn, return (e.g. philanthropy, advising, etc).
- cactusplant7374 2y agoDrag Thing. What a trip down memory lane. I had totally forgotten about playing around with this application in my youth.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI loved that utility. One of the things about Aqua, was that it really slowed things down. We had gotten prerelease OS X, but it basically used Classic UI. Once Aqua came out, things like window drawing, dragging, and general responsiveness, went way down.
- cactusplant7374 2y agoI noticed that. I was always on the cheapest hardware so I made peace with it.
- dcrazy 2y agoAqua would rather drop frames than produce incorrect or partial draws.
- dukeofdoom 2y agoFor the purpose of organization, 15 minute intervals, is how you should look at your day. You only have abut 64 of these in your day to allocate (if you sleep 8 hours) So make the most of them.
- ghssds 2y agoI live my life four quarter century at a time for I don't ignore 4 simultaneous days same earth rotation. Navel Connects 4 Corner 4s. Bikini Bottom is the signature of your personal creator.
- dcrazy 2y agoI don’t know if you’ve been voted down to discourage joke comments or because people aren’t familiar with Timecube.
- defrost 2y agoIt'll be a bit of both, given time the timecube comment might rise again. I get a mixed reaction to tongue in cheek, jokey comments that I make, some rise, most fall - HN doesn't lack a sense of humour but a good many don't want to see it normalised as that tends to drag the general level downwards.
- smorchyborch 2y agoKinda funny watching people OOoh and Aaaah over something that Windows had launched 5 years earlier with Win95. The Mac/Windows flamewars back then were still as vivid as they are today.
- re 2y agoIf you're talking about the Dock demo (vs the Windows taskbar), it's not so much the Dock itself getting that reaction but more so the Genie effect. Mac OS X 10.0 and its Quartz Compositor did enable window effects beyond what Windows was capable of at the time--Windows didn't get a compositing window manager until Vista was released in 2007.
- incanus77 2y agoI don't recall Windows 95 spatially minimizing windows into the bottom of the screen while preserving their dynamically updating contents. Did it? Or was it full of identical grey rectangles and moved window contents just by their outline, not their contents? The Aqua interface was a cut above given the landscape even five years later.
- eru 2y ago> Or was it full of identical grey rectangles and moved window contents just by their outline, not their contents? It moved the whole window, but you could enable the effect you mention to save on system resources. (If memory serves right.)
- jbjbjbjb 2y agoAs a software engineer from the U.K. I always wondered if mega big tech did any interesting work outside the US. Hopefully things have changed now?
- urronglol 2y ago[dead]
- aardvark179 2y agoThey do quite a lot of interesting things, but often either through acquisitions or by collecting up a whole load of specialists when somebody else closes an office. You also find some interesting stuff being done in the UK and the EU because salaries aren’t as high over here.
- eru 2y agoWe did some interesting work at Google Sydney. Google Wave was developed there, for example. (But that was before my time.)
- qingcharles 2y agoDefinitely. Megacorps often outsource projects to development shops in the UK, even if they're not working directly for Megacorp. It's just hard to hear about it because NDA hell. source: experience
- JKCalhoun 2y agoCork had Apple engineering. A lot of work was done in Apple France as well. (For example I worked with the French team that wrote "Data Detectors" when I worked on Preview at Apple). Pretty sure a lot of the French accents I heard on the Photos team were engineers that had decided to move from France to The Valley.
- kergonath 2y agoIndeed. There was a developers teams around Jean-Marie Hullot in Paris up until 2005. They were responsible among others of iCal and iSync, and I believe iPhoto (Hullot was a photographer and a photo nerd).
- runamuck 2y agoI laughed at the title! My friends and I say the original quote way to much, even 25 years later. (From "Fast and Furious - Vin Diesel says "I live my life a quarter mile at a time.")
- eru 2y agoSmall tangent: > As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly unsigned NDA. I wonder if that legally makes any difference? There's probably an oral or implied contract for this kind of stuff, if you keep showing up to work and they keep paying you?
- JKCalhoun 2y agoI've always wondered about the opposite. That is can an NDA even be legally enforced?
- eru 2y agoWhy wouldn't it? I was wondering the opposite: even if you don't explicitly sign some contracts, as long as you have seen them and behave as-if you are following the contract and the other party gives you their part of the bargaining, that might be legally (almost) equivalent to having signed the contract. (I'm not a lawyer, and this is speculation.) It seems the legal term of art for this in 'an implied contract'.
- jpc0 2y agoTerminology I head in law classes over a decade ago is tacid contact and definitely was a legal contract although difficult to prove in court when I did study the little contract law I studied.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoThe NDA could say that by signing this I am to hand over my first born but it isn't enforceable. An obvious straw man example I admit but to make the point that signing a thing doesn't give a thing some kind of godly power.
- eru 2y agoYes, that's why our judges are human, and code is not law. If your NDA contains 'reasonable' clauses only, they will (most likely) bind.
- griomnib 2y agoWasn’t the dock part of next step?
- klntsky 2y agoTo tell a story about slapping a few desktop buttons in a way that makes it interesting to read is a talent
- myvoiceismypass 2y agoIt seems sorta trivial at a surface level but we as developers are always standing on the shoulders of giants. What seems easy and simple was not always so without the tooling, compute, language advances, and knowledge sharing that we have today.
- drummojg 2y agoI feel this in my soul. I work in higher education, and every major contribution I've made has been ripped from my hands and either dashed like the first copy of the ten commandments or handed over to someone shinier. I'm still proud of all I've done.
- leoc 2y agoWell, that seems to be a significant new insight into the mystery of what does or does not happen in Apple Cork https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42255412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42255412 .
- nbzso 2y agoThis year, I push 50. Ideal time to start learning c/c++ and watercolor painting. Don't limit your mind to a predefined timeline. I have a friend, his grandfather 69, completed a law degree and opened an office.:) P.S. The tech industry ageism is standard which must be outlawed. It is not objective and moves the industry in the wrong direction.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago0 - yesterday: can't really remember but happy with whatever I did to get here. Future: stay the course. I've never much liked who I was yesterday, but I'm (almost) always happy with who I am right now.
- candidafighter2 2y ago[dead]
- Lammy 2y ago> I loved doing UI stuff, but somehow ended up working on a command line Mac OS X Server authentication component for At Ease that was to be used with a new line of diskless netboot computers that nobody had actually seen. It turned out I’d actually been on the iMac project all this time, and in the end they got hard drives. Relevant: Macintosh Network Computer — https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-history/ https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-... — https://web.archive.org/web/20130603044116/https://sw.thecsiac.com/techs/abstract/034554#.Uawed7fP32d https://web.archive.org/web/20130603044116/https://sw.thecsi... — https://web.archive.org/web/19961220160908/http://www.macweek.com:80/mw_1021/news_nc_coalition.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961220160908/http://www.macwee... — https://web.archive.org/web/19961220043823/http://www.macweek.com/mw_1037/news_pippin.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961220043823/http://www.macwee... — https://web.archive.org/web/20000531132121/http://www.theapplecollection.com/design/macreleased/MacNC.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000531132121/http://www.theapp... “During a speech trumpeting the network computer for the Harvard Computer Society earlier in December, Larry Ellison, Oracle chief executive officer and Apple board member, responded to a question about Apple's role in the NC space. Ellison said the Macintosh NC would be available in April, with a near-300-MHz processor and a 17-inch screen. The Mac NC will run on the Mac OS and cost less than $1,000, according to attendees. Ellison added that the NC would not ship with a hard drive, but one could be added to the unit for an additional $100. ”
- kelnos 2y agoThis is a fun story, but also just reminded me of how destructively eccentric Jobs could be. All the shenanigans to pretend the author lived in the US, flying him back and forth from Ireland, planning his interactions (or lack of interactions) with Jobs so the deception wouldn't be exposed, and everything. What a colossal waste of time, money, and stress just to cater to the ego of Steve Jobs. And then they threw all that work away, seemingly mainly because it was done out of the wrong office. Presumably the final Dock that shipped was significantly different from the author's version, but throwing away all the code and doing a full rewrite is rarely warranted.
- rob74 2y agoI assume that the Cork development team was built up before Jobs took over, which also explains why they were all laid off shortly after the author quit. Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino? If he were still around, he would probably hate home office/remote work and join Elon Musk in the "people can have all the home office they want as long as they work 40 hours per week in the office" camp...
- leoc 2y agoOne wrinkle here is that Jobs himself was by all accounts the person most responsible for Apple opening a Cork facility in 1980, and for whatever Apple and the Irish government promised each other as part of that deal. There's some indication that Irish governments were unhappy with what they got from it https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-macsharry-objected-to-additional-support-for-apple-in-cork-1.3735662 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-... but it's hard to be sure exactly what happened there: Apple was probably not in the best shape to carry out ambitious relocation plans for much of the '80s, for one thing. While I don't have boundless love for either Jobs or RTO mandates, and as an Irishman I would very much rather not see Cork getting the dirty end of the stick, I have to defend Jobs' desire for centralisation a bit here. There's considerable evidence that having nearly all the central product and design people within easy reach of SJ stalking around 1 Infinite Loop did in fact work very well for Apple in the second Jobs era. Maybe it was still a wrong decision, despite appearances, but you can hardly say that it was an eccentric one. (And in 2000 the tools for offsite or multi-site collaboration weren't even as not-entirely-great as they are now.) It was other people who brought in the madcap element of trying to hide things from the boss, not Jobs himself.
- kernel_cat 2y agoI just hate the Dock. I wish there was a way to make it completely disappear. I have no need for it, everything I can do via Terminal/open, Spotlight, or cmd+tab app switcher. It's really annoying how baked into the OS it is. Even trying to auto-hide the dock in new versions of MacOS is a huge pain in the arse.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoRight click the divider line > Turn Hiding On
- kernel_cat 2y agoNot complete without setting the autohide delay which doesn't have a GUI option, need to set with a 3rd party tool or `defaults`.
- rm445 2y ago> You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway). On a website with huge margins at the sides. I think the OSX Dock is a pretty good thing, but it makes so much more sense to keep it on the side of the screen and preserve vertical pixels. Unlike (some versions of) the Windows Taskbar, the icons are all square with no text, so you're not even sacrificing readability.
- abroadwin 2y agoI just set mine to auto-hide. Right now it's showing just shy of 30 icons, and I feel it really benefits from the additional horizontal width.
- pavlov 2y ago> "I was shown some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it leaked they would know it was me that had talked" This near-paranoid level of secrecy was because Apple leaked like a sieve in 1997 when Jobs returned as interim CEO. There were sites like Mac OS Rumors that reported about internal meetings and projects in almost realtime. Nothing that was started before Jobs's return was secret. Leaking seemed to be part of standard office politics at Apple. Jobs wanted to clamp down on that. Who knows if they actually had measures like described in the article (which suggests that every screenshot of Aqua carried a steganographic hardware id) but the threat worked. The leaks were obviously bad for Apple, but as a teenager in my first tech industry job I found them fascinating reading. It was a rare insight into the inner workings of famous tech company in faraway California (even if it was the company that everybody in the media was convinced would be bankrupt in a year or two, but that just made the product drama more poignant).
- MichaelZuo 2y agoYeah Jobs was probably afraid of anyone involved in sensitive stuff, not based in Cupertino, to be engaged in games or tricks like that. And they would be too far away to closely monitor.
- lukeh 2y agoI remember an internal website (circa 1997) having the Mac OS Rumors logo with a big cross through it. :)
- p_l 2y agoThe mention of Finder being built with Carbon APIs using OS9 as dev environment makes me wonder if that's not why some Finder APIs in 2020 still used classic Mac pathnames (with colons as separators). Had to find some gnarly AppleScript to convert pathnames when interacting with Finder
- lukeh 2y agoI suspect using Carbon also helped shake out Carbon itself. Eventually the Finder was rewritten in Cocoa. Maybe one day it'll be rewritten in SwiftUI and some SwiftUI bugs will get shaken out ;)
- p_l 2y agoMaybe one day it will stop using classic paths then... fortunately I don't have to deal with it anymore ;3
- nxobject 2y agoI wonder as well how much the early Finders were platform-independent: are there builds that ran on MacOS 8, for example?
- dwighttk 2y agoEarn a penny Owe a dime…
- pbrum 2y agoThe story is great on its own, but that ending was absolutely magnificent
- julik 2y agoI wonder how many HN readers remember what DragThing was and have used it... memories.