6 Reasons Why Young Men Should Not Become Programmers

mavericktraveler.com

5 points·jseliger··5 comments

Only young people men or women have the stamina required for the amount of learning you have to do in a short period of time to become good at the skill.

But on the plus side if fewer people enter the market the more prices will go up for those who remain.

It's very easy to program. As the article says, anyone can do it. It's much harder to design systems that can grow without encountering pain points. The on-the-ground programmers should view it as a starting point; to turn into a company founder or system architect or manager. If I'm still coding day-to-day at 35, I'll see that as a failed career. But some people just actually love it; and for them, if they're happy with the limitations to their income and the risk of being replaced in 5 or 20 years, they should continue.

While I respect your opinion - it's easy to see how long it really does take new comers to get proficient in anything (a really long time) - I'm not sure exactly how replaceable highly productive people are. I read this as basically "If you don't make it out of software and into management by 35, you're hosed." I don't see why system architects can't code fairly regularly - are you claiming that to be effective and valuable you need to spend all your time corralling people? They may not working tickets, but they are probably doing high quality prototype work.

There are a couple of legitimate (if obvious) points here, but the author seems to be some kind of PUA crackpot making money off the sexual insecurity of programmers. See e.g. this kind of nonsense:

http://mavericktraveler.com/why-brazilian-guys-dont-need-gam...

It's really easy to make a Facebook clone just like it's really easy to build a soap box car, thus, automotive engineers are doomed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com