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I'm 25 and find this kind of depressing, any good society takes care of its elders (read: not old, just older) These are the folks that toiled away on the compi

I'm 25 and find this kind of depressing, any good society takes care of its elders (read: not old, just older) These are the folks that toiled away on the compilers, libraries, and patterns that we have been standing on to build the current generation of tech, and this is how some of them have fared? I suppose the ruthless competition of this industry is a double edged sword.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
MCRed 11y ago
They're also the ones who understand how things work! As we've gotten more open source software out there and faster computers, programmers are naturally moving up the stack using higher and higher level languages. Where before you needed hand customized C++ (with some assembly!) to do something you often will now use a scripting language. But in doing so a lot of hard core engineering and architecture understanding is dissipating. People pick node because it's hot without knowing enough to know that it's going to be a problem for a large project, etc. I've seen engineers toiling away with the wrong technology experiencing great deals of frustration but not even realizing that its' because they have the wrong tool. I think a big part of the problem is that companies are too often run by business people who don't understand software. So the managers of programmers are often not programmers. (It should be engineers all the way up to the CEO, and including the CEO if you're a technology company.) So we have business guys picking technology stacks and stuff like that. Engineers have been commoditized, and they feel like we're interchangeable cogs, the certainly don't know enough tho tell the difference between a mediocre and good backend or fronted engineer. And so, of course they don't value experience. Over time people retire, some retire young, and so teams shouldn't have an even distribution of ages, but they do need wisdom. So, somebody should be wise on each team.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

MCRed 11y ago

They're also the ones who understand how things work! As we've gotten more open source software out there and faster computers, programmers are naturally moving up the stack using higher and higher level languages. Where before you needed hand customized C++ (with some assembly!) to do something you often will now use a scripting language. But in doing so a lot of hard core engineering and architecture understanding is dissipating. People pick node because it's hot without knowing enough to know that it's going to be a problem for a large project, etc. I've seen engineers toiling away with the wrong technology experiencing great deals of frustration but not even realizing that its' because they have the wrong tool. I think a big part of the problem is that companies are too often run by business people who don't understand software. So the managers of programmers are often not programmers. (It should be engineers all the way up to the CEO, and including the CEO if you're a technology company.) So we have business guys picking technology stacks and stuff like that. Engineers have been commoditized, and they feel like we're interchangeable cogs, the certainly don't know enough tho tell the difference between a mediocre and good backend or fronted engineer. And so, of course they don't value experience. Over time people retire, some retire young, and so teams shouldn't have an even distribution of ages, but they do need wisdom. So, somebody should be wise on each team.