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I'm over 40 and I've always worked as a consultant. Until recently I was the sole developer on a site doing eight figures in revenue (now I'm team lead). With

I'm over 40 and I've always worked as a consultant. Until recently I was the sole developer on a site doing eight figures in revenue (now I'm team lead). Without being arrogant here, if my skills match but someone doesn't want my level of experience, it's not a good sign for the someone. On the flip side, I would love to throw out all of the languages and frameworks I've been using for the past few years and learn entirely new tech. That's part of the point of being in this business! If you're a startup and have a bias against us greybeards, you're only hurting yourself. We'll learn your framework-du-jour and tell you how it bears an uncanny resemblance to something that didn't work so well in the past. Or maybe we've never seen anything like it, in which case we'll be delighted to cast aside all that old crap.

chx 12y ago
I usually summarize this thusly: "I have already made the mistake you are about to make". It should be obvious the time savings would worth it to "rent" me. And I am months away from my 40th birthday.
- SiVal 11y ago
  It's funny you should say that. A few years ago, at a company whose name everyone here knows I, an old gray-hair, almost lost my full-time job for warning a VP that she was about to make a mistake I'd seen before. I honestly thought she was joking when she told me about the approach she was going to use to deal with a "hard deadline" of four months. I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan. She became indignant and ended our meeting (just the two of us), getting me transferred for "not being supportive of the team" and trying, unsuccessfully, to get me fired. She gave the job to her three dozen "supportive" young programmers, who ended up taking 28 months (!!) to get the "4-month" project finally working. So, after all that, did she eventually apologize and tell me that, yes, she'd made the same mistake I told her I'd seen before with the same results for the same reason, and that she should have at least asked me more about it instead of throwing me out? Of course not. This is the real world. She never spoke to me again and never forgave me.
  - plongeur 11y ago
    Pretty sad story ... I observed this kind of scenario myself :/
  - pdpi 11y ago
    To be honest, I don't find it that surprising. Being laughed at is not something people take kindly to. Of all the possible ways of letting her know that you thought her plan sucked, that was the one that was doomed to fail right from the start.
    - rapind 11y ago
      An experienced and mature manager might appreciate the frankness.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        You can be frank without laughing at it.
        rapind 11y ago
        For sure. Don't be a dick is a pretty good strategy. However, I didn't get the impression that was his intent though: "I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan".
        SiVal 11y ago
        Right. I was neither being "frank" nor intentionally laughing at her plan. She was smiling, and I thought she was kidding. I was smiling, and she apparently thought I was approving. Suddenly, we both realized we were wrong. Oops. At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions, but she wasn't technical enough to understand what I meant by that, which made her angrier, and when I suggested an approach that would give us a temporary "Plan B" just in case we "ended up a couple of weeks late", she declared me "unsupportive" and ended the meeting.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Did you grow the site into 8 figures or brought on board? What was the site doing? I would imagine management would be terrified of reliance on one, bus-getting-hit-by developer.
- leonroy 11y ago
  You'd be surprised how cheap or short sighted managers can sometimes be. I guess from their point of view they might see a developer as overly expensive and dogmatic. I've seen companies with 7-8 figures and reliant on just 3-4 devs with unique and non overlapping abilities. It's more common than you think!
- isomorphic 11y ago
  I developed the site entirely. To be clear: The site is essentially the interface to the business. I won't say I developed it "myself," since I was in a team with non-technical people who knew what functions they wanted from the site. However I was the only technical person involved. Now we have more developers, for which I am very thankful. Unfortunately, way too much knowledge is locked up in me, and I never have time to commit that knowledge to bits, paper, or oral history. Believe me, buses and beer trucks have been discussed as possible ends to my consulting gig. It is my fondest hope that this business has key-man insurance on me. I'd be pleased to know that they have such insurance, but less interested in knowing how much the policy is for!
tomerbd 12y ago
i'm still trying to figure out whether to learn ruby on rails or play2 scala for web development, what do you suggest?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  You're not asking me but I'd go for the one that you're likely to be least familiar with, that will teach you the most.
- bad_user 11y ago
  Having worked with Ruby on Rails in the past and with Play2 and Scala currently, I think I can answer that. For your regular web app, both frameworks are mostly the same, both are boring - Rails is more productive for very common tasks, but Play2 is safer because of the underlying language (well, if you pick Scala, otherwise Java just stays in your way). Things get more interesting in Play2 when scalability or latency starts to matter. That's when you discover that Play2's architecture is entirely asynchronous and that Play2 supports asynchronous responses and web sockets natively. It does so by means of futures [1], actors [2] and iteratees [3] (also being migrated to reactive streams [4]). Of course, the easy route with Play2 would be with Java, however I recommend that you pick up Scala. By doing so you're going to get exposed to concepts from functional programming in a language sitting on a platform that's very much practical for real world use. There's also this book on functional programming in Scala that's amongst the best books written on the subject [5]. Functional programming changes the way you think and it's all about sanity, functional code being easier to test, being easier to parallelize and being much less prone to accidental bugs. But while you're at it also consider learning Haskell, probably the best functional programming language available, because even if you're not using it, it's currently the lingua franca for FP concepts, so when reading papers and blog articles on interesting design patterns related to FP, most of them are described in Haskell. It also spoils you with its incredible type system, so a language like Scala will become the minimum that you'll tolerate, working in Java, C#, Python or Go becoming unbearable ;-) A really good beginners course is this one from edX [6]. And then go learn Clojure, because it's a really practical LISP that is also oriented towards FP, except that FP in a LISP is really different from FP in static languages like Haskell or Scala. And you know, the best thing about this path is that you're not going to learn just a framework, or yet another language, but you're going to learn about functional programming, which is a concept that transcends programming languages with its related mentality and design patterns and is useful no matter what you're doing and in what language. But then going back to Scala and Play2, well that's useful right now too. And did you know that Scala compiles to Javascript too and it's awesome? [1] http://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/core/futures.html http://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/core/futures.html [2] http://akka.io/ http://akka.io/ [3] https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.3.x/Iteratees https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.3.x/Iteratees [4] http://www.reactive-streams.org/ http://www.reactive-streams.org/ [5] http://www.manning.com/bjarnason/ http://www.manning.com/bjarnason/ [6] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-functional-programming-delftx-fp101x https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-functional-programmi... [7] http://www.scala-js.org/ http://www.scala-js.org/
mhomde 11y ago
A novice doesn't know what tools he need. An expert has mastered the tools he has been given. A master starts thinking about the tools he COULD have :)
- allendoerfer 11y ago
  I will get downvoted for this, but have to do it anyway: NPM either disproves your thesis or has an exceptionally high amount of masters in its community for a language at that level of abstraction.
cookiecaper 11y ago
I absolutely agree. Over the years I've worked with many sharp guys that are 50+ and their experience always commands massive respect from me. People who dismiss the more experienced segment of the workforce are, to me, absolutely, inexcusably incapable of critical thought. If all one sees the glitz of the young guys at TechCrunch Disrupt and concludes that they're the only talented devs out there, I want nothing to do with that person in a professional capacity, to put it plainly.
ownagefool 11y ago
The main problem with hiring grey beards, as you put it, is that a lot of them aren't amazing, but due to years, they have an authorative attitude and expect to be paid more than your 20 something devs. If it's my money, I'd hire the 20 year old with gaping holes in their knowledge who are willing and eager to learn over the 40s something dev who thinks their way is better because they're 10 years my senior. I have a lot of anecdotal experience where I've rejected folks who were lacking a basic understanding of the pro's and con's of something. These guys aren't rejected because they don't understand the subject, but because they fail to accept there are scenarios where doing something the other way is better, or that at the very least, things at a bit give and take. This, I postulate, is generally because these guys have 10 years of 1 years experience, rather than the experience they're trying to sell themselves as having. These are the type of guys who will struggle when they're older. That said, when it comes down to it, most of the guys I try to hire are older than me. Age isn't a deciding factor, they just tend to be better.
- pjungwir 11y ago
  Something that really frustrates me is people who are more expert than me but can't justify their pronouncements. I had a high school friend who I'm sure was smarter than me claim, "No one does object oriented programming the right way [except him]," but when pressed would just deliberately play games and mystify. Most DBAs I've worked with had their preferred way of doing things, but were incapable of answering Why? It's not easy working with these people. I've come to really value a colleague who can teach---that is, who can explain why they choose what they do. I'd say anecdotally 2 out of 5 times I've encountered this it's been someone covering up for their own lack of understanding. These are the worst and the most inflexible. All but one DBA I've worked with was this way. It's the natural result of cargo-culting. 2 out of 5 times it's because the person doesn't have patience to explain all the background you'd need to understand, or they don't trust that you have sufficient background. Sysadmins do this all the time. If you're smart and already pretty familiar with their field, it's very frustrating. This isn't as bad as the former case, but it indicates personnel conflict and lack of trust. It's understandable though, e.g. answering technical questions for business people. I've gotten pretty skilled at giving non-jargony, intelligible, short, "popularizing" answers, that also invite further questions if desired. But it's not easy. And 1 out of 5 it's because people with experience have forgotten the reasons. I've been there too. Just the other week on a Rails project someone wanted to use an ActiveRecord default_scope of "where deleted_at is null", and I had felt the pain of that on past projects, but it took a while to dredge up the details from my memory. Most of the above reasons don't correlate with age/experience, but the last one does. Experienced people have so internalized certain lessons that they've forgotten the reasons behind them. You could say this is a bit like Michael Polanyi's "tacit knowledge". In this case, hopefully they still have mental flexibility to recognize that nothing is 100%, and if you give them time to remember and communicate their reasons, you can have a reasoned discussion and make a good decision. But recognize that making people think in this way often "feels like work." You are asking them to exert themselves, so it's important to communicate in a way that isn't challenging their knowledge but asking them to share it more deeply.

chx 12y ago

I usually summarize this thusly: "I have already made the mistake you are about to make". It should be obvious the time savings would worth it to "rent" me. And I am months away from my 40th birthday.

SiVal 11y ago
It's funny you should say that. A few years ago, at a company whose name everyone here knows I, an old gray-hair, almost lost my full-time job for warning a VP that she was about to make a mistake I'd seen before. I honestly thought she was joking when she told me about the approach she was going to use to deal with a "hard deadline" of four months. I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan. She became indignant and ended our meeting (just the two of us), getting me transferred for "not being supportive of the team" and trying, unsuccessfully, to get me fired. She gave the job to her three dozen "supportive" young programmers, who ended up taking 28 months (!!) to get the "4-month" project finally working. So, after all that, did she eventually apologize and tell me that, yes, she'd made the same mistake I told her I'd seen before with the same results for the same reason, and that she should have at least asked me more about it instead of throwing me out? Of course not. This is the real world. She never spoke to me again and never forgave me.
- plongeur 11y ago
  Pretty sad story ... I observed this kind of scenario myself :/
- pdpi 11y ago
  To be honest, I don't find it that surprising. Being laughed at is not something people take kindly to. Of all the possible ways of letting her know that you thought her plan sucked, that was the one that was doomed to fail right from the start.
  - rapind 11y ago
    An experienced and mature manager might appreciate the frankness.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      You can be frank without laughing at it.
      - rapind 11y ago
        For sure. Don't be a dick is a pretty good strategy. However, I didn't get the impression that was his intent though: "I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan".
        SiVal 11y ago
        Right. I was neither being "frank" nor intentionally laughing at her plan. She was smiling, and I thought she was kidding. I was smiling, and she apparently thought I was approving. Suddenly, we both realized we were wrong. Oops. At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions, but she wasn't technical enough to understand what I meant by that, which made her angrier, and when I suggested an approach that would give us a temporary "Plan B" just in case we "ended up a couple of weeks late", she declared me "unsupportive" and ended the meeting.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Did you grow the site into 8 figures or brought on board? What was the site doing? I would imagine management would be terrified of reliance on one, bus-getting-hit-by developer.

leonroy 11y ago
You'd be surprised how cheap or short sighted managers can sometimes be. I guess from their point of view they might see a developer as overly expensive and dogmatic. I've seen companies with 7-8 figures and reliant on just 3-4 devs with unique and non overlapping abilities. It's more common than you think!
isomorphic 11y ago
I developed the site entirely. To be clear: The site is essentially the interface to the business. I won't say I developed it "myself," since I was in a team with non-technical people who knew what functions they wanted from the site. However I was the only technical person involved. Now we have more developers, for which I am very thankful. Unfortunately, way too much knowledge is locked up in me, and I never have time to commit that knowledge to bits, paper, or oral history. Believe me, buses and beer trucks have been discussed as possible ends to my consulting gig. It is my fondest hope that this business has key-man insurance on me. I'd be pleased to know that they have such insurance, but less interested in knowing how much the policy is for!

tomerbd 12y ago

i'm still trying to figure out whether to learn ruby on rails or play2 scala for web development, what do you suggest?

jacquesm 12y ago
You're not asking me but I'd go for the one that you're likely to be least familiar with, that will teach you the most.
bad_user 11y ago
Having worked with Ruby on Rails in the past and with Play2 and Scala currently, I think I can answer that. For your regular web app, both frameworks are mostly the same, both are boring - Rails is more productive for very common tasks, but Play2 is safer because of the underlying language (well, if you pick Scala, otherwise Java just stays in your way). Things get more interesting in Play2 when scalability or latency starts to matter. That's when you discover that Play2's architecture is entirely asynchronous and that Play2 supports asynchronous responses and web sockets natively. It does so by means of futures [1], actors [2] and iteratees [3] (also being migrated to reactive streams [4]). Of course, the easy route with Play2 would be with Java, however I recommend that you pick up Scala. By doing so you're going to get exposed to concepts from functional programming in a language sitting on a platform that's very much practical for real world use. There's also this book on functional programming in Scala that's amongst the best books written on the subject [5]. Functional programming changes the way you think and it's all about sanity, functional code being easier to test, being easier to parallelize and being much less prone to accidental bugs. But while you're at it also consider learning Haskell, probably the best functional programming language available, because even if you're not using it, it's currently the lingua franca for FP concepts, so when reading papers and blog articles on interesting design patterns related to FP, most of them are described in Haskell. It also spoils you with its incredible type system, so a language like Scala will become the minimum that you'll tolerate, working in Java, C#, Python or Go becoming unbearable ;-) A really good beginners course is this one from edX [6]. And then go learn Clojure, because it's a really practical LISP that is also oriented towards FP, except that FP in a LISP is really different from FP in static languages like Haskell or Scala. And you know, the best thing about this path is that you're not going to learn just a framework, or yet another language, but you're going to learn about functional programming, which is a concept that transcends programming languages with its related mentality and design patterns and is useful no matter what you're doing and in what language. But then going back to Scala and Play2, well that's useful right now too. And did you know that Scala compiles to Javascript too and it's awesome? [1] http://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/core/futures.html http://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/core/futures.html [2] http://akka.io/ http://akka.io/ [3] https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.3.x/Iteratees https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.3.x/Iteratees [4] http://www.reactive-streams.org/ http://www.reactive-streams.org/ [5] http://www.manning.com/bjarnason/ http://www.manning.com/bjarnason/ [6] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-functional-programming-delftx-fp101x https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-functional-programmi... [7] http://www.scala-js.org/ http://www.scala-js.org/

mhomde 11y ago

A novice doesn't know what tools he need. An expert has mastered the tools he has been given. A master starts thinking about the tools he COULD have :)

allendoerfer 11y ago
I will get downvoted for this, but have to do it anyway: NPM either disproves your thesis or has an exceptionally high amount of masters in its community for a language at that level of abstraction.

cookiecaper 11y ago

I absolutely agree. Over the years I've worked with many sharp guys that are 50+ and their experience always commands massive respect from me. People who dismiss the more experienced segment of the workforce are, to me, absolutely, inexcusably incapable of critical thought. If all one sees the glitz of the young guys at TechCrunch Disrupt and concludes that they're the only talented devs out there, I want nothing to do with that person in a professional capacity, to put it plainly.

ownagefool 11y ago

The main problem with hiring grey beards, as you put it, is that a lot of them aren't amazing, but due to years, they have an authorative attitude and expect to be paid more than your 20 something devs. If it's my money, I'd hire the 20 year old with gaping holes in their knowledge who are willing and eager to learn over the 40s something dev who thinks their way is better because they're 10 years my senior. I have a lot of anecdotal experience where I've rejected folks who were lacking a basic understanding of the pro's and con's of something. These guys aren't rejected because they don't understand the subject, but because they fail to accept there are scenarios where doing something the other way is better, or that at the very least, things at a bit give and take. This, I postulate, is generally because these guys have 10 years of 1 years experience, rather than the experience they're trying to sell themselves as having. These are the type of guys who will struggle when they're older. That said, when it comes down to it, most of the guys I try to hire are older than me. Age isn't a deciding factor, they just tend to be better.

pjungwir 11y ago
Something that really frustrates me is people who are more expert than me but can't justify their pronouncements. I had a high school friend who I'm sure was smarter than me claim, "No one does object oriented programming the right way [except him]," but when pressed would just deliberately play games and mystify. Most DBAs I've worked with had their preferred way of doing things, but were incapable of answering Why? It's not easy working with these people. I've come to really value a colleague who can teach---that is, who can explain why they choose what they do. I'd say anecdotally 2 out of 5 times I've encountered this it's been someone covering up for their own lack of understanding. These are the worst and the most inflexible. All but one DBA I've worked with was this way. It's the natural result of cargo-culting. 2 out of 5 times it's because the person doesn't have patience to explain all the background you'd need to understand, or they don't trust that you have sufficient background. Sysadmins do this all the time. If you're smart and already pretty familiar with their field, it's very frustrating. This isn't as bad as the former case, but it indicates personnel conflict and lack of trust. It's understandable though, e.g. answering technical questions for business people. I've gotten pretty skilled at giving non-jargony, intelligible, short, "popularizing" answers, that also invite further questions if desired. But it's not easy. And 1 out of 5 it's because people with experience have forgotten the reasons. I've been there too. Just the other week on a Rails project someone wanted to use an ActiveRecord default_scope of "where deleted_at is null", and I had felt the pain of that on past projects, but it took a while to dredge up the details from my memory. Most of the above reasons don't correlate with age/experience, but the last one does. Experienced people have so internalized certain lessons that they've forgotten the reasons behind them. You could say this is a bit like Michael Polanyi's "tacit knowledge". In this case, hopefully they still have mental flexibility to recognize that nothing is 100%, and if you give them time to remember and communicate their reasons, you can have a reasoned discussion and make a good decision. But recognize that making people think in this way often "feels like work." You are asking them to exert themselves, so it's important to communicate in a way that isn't challenging their knowledge but asking them to share it more deeply.