5 ms·
As a 40-something who is 20 years into his career, I don't think I'm a particularly better PROGRAMMER than I was about five years in. But there is SO much more
by beat 14y ago
As a 40-something who is 20 years into his career, I don't think I'm a particularly better PROGRAMMER than I was about five years in. But there is SO much more to being a useful tech than programming! And I'm much more sophisticated about big-picture thinking, business, and planning these days. Back when I was barely past "junior", I got to work on some really cool software at a dotcom-era startup. Technically, it was a blast. As a business decision, it was absolutely idiotic, and it was a massive management failure to have us wasting our time on it at all. (Basically, the idea was that six man-months of code at the time would save the company millions in the future. Which would have been true, if it HAD a future. Never, ever waste precious development effort on something that can be bought easily off-the-shelf and isn't core competence for your product! That's not even a good use of time in an established company, much less a ticking-clock startup!)
As I'm prone to saying, I cost as much as two junior programmers, but I can do things that two junior programmers can't do. And actually, cost is one of the problems older programmers have... senior == expensive. On the other hand, if you're in the industry for 20+ years and haven't found a way to make yourself and your work more valuable than what some drone straight out of college can do, but you expect to get paid more than said drone, you're asking to get sidelined.
The problem isn't the myth that older programmers are less flexible than younger ones. The problem is that so many older programmers haven't attended to their careers in a way to make themselves substantially more valuable than some pliant kid. It's not enough to do the kid's job better... you have to do things the kid CANNOT do.
- jorgeleo 14y ago"I cost as much as two junior programmers, but I can do things that two junior programmers can't do" Love it. I'm about the same place in my career, and I completely agree.
- beat 14y agoThis reminds me of a conversation with an old friend... a pic of the two of us when I was 20 or so appeared on Facebook, and he asked that if 20 year old me met today's me, what would surprise him most? I replied that it would be how today's me kept calling 20 year old me "dumbass".
- D9u 14y agoDitto re: dumbass If only I had listened to my mother... But, noooo! I was almost 30, and my advanced age meant that I (thought that I) knew it all... Here I am, almost 50, and I still don't know nearly as much as I thought I did.
- bubbleRefuge 14y agoKnowing a domain acquired with experience and which isn't taught in school is a big differentiator. Maybe game programming/graphics is like this ?
- chipsy 14y agoThere are a number of such domains... security, DSP, real-time systems all have "unnamed" skills to them. Games happen to be pretty good as well because they let you wrap several different kinds of technologies together - the tricky part with games is really that they need great design much more than they need good engineering, and yet you can ignore this as a coder because you can always make your renderers and simulations more generalized and complex.
- ww520 14y ago"I cost as much as two junior programmers, but I can do things that two junior programmers can't do" Don't undercut yourself; you provide much greater value than that. People outside of engineering don't have a really clear picture about the roles and positions, and the cost structure of running a development team. I remember a conversation with one of the clients. He was trying to interview candidates for project manager position and asked me for its job description. I explained to him what the typical structure of a development team is and what roles different people play, like project manager, development manager, architect, team lead, front-end developer, back-end dev, dba, UI designer, qa, etc. Then I casually mentioned I'm doing all those for you in this project and you are actually saving a lot of money despite my high billing rate. He appreciated that.