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I know someone who just retired from a career of software development and is in his late sixtys. He has never stopped learning new tech and innovating on behalf

I know someone who just retired from a career of software development and is in his late sixtys. He has never stopped learning new tech and innovating on behalf of his employer. He, even in retirement, is well compensated, respected and sometimes even consulted. Watching him, I think the key is being bright and choosing where you make your career carefully.

pekk 14y ago
Does that mean if an older person has a problem in this industry due to their age, it is because they weren't bright?
- tgflynn 14y ago
  Maybe, but it could also mean they're too bright. People whose brains are good at generalizing from data eventually realize that the vast majority of "new technology" in computers is really 40 (or more) year old technology with a new paint job. Once you realize that it's very hard to get excited about these things. There are still things to get excited about : machine learning, AI, etc but they tend to be orders of magnitude more difficult to understand than the technology stuff you've spent a couple of decades working with.
  - csixty4 14y ago
    For me, I see echoes of conversations I had ten years ago. CSS preprocessors? Server-side Javascript? Anybody who proposed those in the past was flamed into submission by the community for deviating from standards or, worse, being "lazy". There's nothing new there. What's new is the community's openness to doing things differently, to accepting that web templates don't need to be written directly in the languages sent to the browser. I've been writing Javascript pretty much since there WAS a Javascript, so I love node.js. But I'm just getting my feet wet and I'm three years behind the game because I expected it to be written off as a "toy", just like every other time someone suggested running Javascript on the server. I know I need to get over this skepticism, but I'm having a hard time figuring out which horses to bet on anymore. I feel like I'm close to just saying "screw it" and becoming that crazy graybeard who uses a completely off-the-wall technology stack because that's what he enjoys and to hell with everyone else.
    - DannoHung 14y ago
      The one thing that I want to counter people who complain about the whole nothing new in heaven and earth issue is that the reimplementations are typically removing historical cruft that made the old versions untennable for contemporary development or have solved a hard problem that made things work poorly. Now, that doesn't mean the new version is tennable, but it means that it's probably time to re-evaluate the old idea.
      - csixty4 14y ago
        > reimplementations are typically removing historical cruft that made the old versions untennable for contemporary development or have solved a hard problem that made things work poorly. Oh, definitely. Node.js wouldn't be anywhere near as popular without V8 behind it. Also, without the strides Javascript has made in recent years. I was messing around with a MacOS 7.6 machine last night and Netscape 3 was throwing Javascript errors all over the place when it hit modern code. I think another part of it is cultural. Since I brought up CSS preprocessors as my other example, a lot of the animosity toward them "back in the day" was driven by the web standards movement. We finally had sane standards that worked across the big browsers, and then some upstart was trying to introduce something proprietary and the community reacted. Now, we have little hiccups once in a while but things are pretty much standard across the board and that makes a stable platform for innovation.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    Programming can soak up any amount of intelligence you throw at it. Whether or not you get bored is an orthogonal concern.
- TallGuyShort 14y ago
  As he said, it may also mean that they made their career in a poor place, and maybe that's more to do with luck than with brightness. My Dad, for instance, has been very frustrated lately as an aging engineer, but it's more because he's had some really crummy managers than anything to do with his ability.
- voidlogic 14y ago
  No, you are picking and choosing my words, what I actually said was: "being bright AND choosing where you make your career carefully"

pekk 14y ago

Does that mean if an older person has a problem in this industry due to their age, it is because they weren't bright?

tgflynn 14y ago
Maybe, but it could also mean they're too bright. People whose brains are good at generalizing from data eventually realize that the vast majority of "new technology" in computers is really 40 (or more) year old technology with a new paint job. Once you realize that it's very hard to get excited about these things. There are still things to get excited about : machine learning, AI, etc but they tend to be orders of magnitude more difficult to understand than the technology stuff you've spent a couple of decades working with.
- csixty4 14y ago
  For me, I see echoes of conversations I had ten years ago. CSS preprocessors? Server-side Javascript? Anybody who proposed those in the past was flamed into submission by the community for deviating from standards or, worse, being "lazy". There's nothing new there. What's new is the community's openness to doing things differently, to accepting that web templates don't need to be written directly in the languages sent to the browser. I've been writing Javascript pretty much since there WAS a Javascript, so I love node.js. But I'm just getting my feet wet and I'm three years behind the game because I expected it to be written off as a "toy", just like every other time someone suggested running Javascript on the server. I know I need to get over this skepticism, but I'm having a hard time figuring out which horses to bet on anymore. I feel like I'm close to just saying "screw it" and becoming that crazy graybeard who uses a completely off-the-wall technology stack because that's what he enjoys and to hell with everyone else.
  - DannoHung 14y ago
    The one thing that I want to counter people who complain about the whole nothing new in heaven and earth issue is that the reimplementations are typically removing historical cruft that made the old versions untennable for contemporary development or have solved a hard problem that made things work poorly. Now, that doesn't mean the new version is tennable, but it means that it's probably time to re-evaluate the old idea.
    - csixty4 14y ago
      > reimplementations are typically removing historical cruft that made the old versions untennable for contemporary development or have solved a hard problem that made things work poorly. Oh, definitely. Node.js wouldn't be anywhere near as popular without V8 behind it. Also, without the strides Javascript has made in recent years. I was messing around with a MacOS 7.6 machine last night and Netscape 3 was throwing Javascript errors all over the place when it hit modern code. I think another part of it is cultural. Since I brought up CSS preprocessors as my other example, a lot of the animosity toward them "back in the day" was driven by the web standards movement. We finally had sane standards that worked across the big browsers, and then some upstart was trying to introduce something proprietary and the community reacted. Now, we have little hiccups once in a while but things are pretty much standard across the board and that makes a stable platform for innovation.
- dasil003 14y ago
  Programming can soak up any amount of intelligence you throw at it. Whether or not you get bored is an orthogonal concern.
TallGuyShort 14y ago
As he said, it may also mean that they made their career in a poor place, and maybe that's more to do with luck than with brightness. My Dad, for instance, has been very frustrated lately as an aging engineer, but it's more because he's had some really crummy managers than anything to do with his ability.
voidlogic 14y ago
No, you are picking and choosing my words, what I actually said was: "being bright AND choosing where you make your career carefully"