Comment by sean_patel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sean_patel | Hacker News Reader

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> Want an example where the programmer codes in something other than “antiquated” RPG? How about HTML5, JavaScript, and C#?

With all due respect, Sir -- and I understand I will be in your shoes in 4 decades -- the site you've built, using HTML5, JS, Grails, Groovy and what not I presume - kettlerusa.com - has the look and feel of a 90s website (think the whitehouse.gov * unders Bill & Gore's administration), esp. that ugly green "Free Shipping" button at the bottom right. The site's also not responsive / mobile friendly and gives several "rookie" invalidations, errors when run through common web validators. I didn't even get to performance testing.

So... is there some truth to what Zuckerberg said (and I am no fan of his BTW). Personally I don't think Old(er) people are any less smart than younger people. But I do see time and again that Old(er) people have a hard time (or are not putting effort into) understanding and implementing current tech trends in terms of UI, Usability, best practices etc.

Thoughts?

* EDIT 1: Found the Whitehouse.gov homepage from the 90s. Funny that Whitehouse.gov posted it as a "throwback" but this wouldn't be anything I would be proud of if I was the President in this Web Era lol. => https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/10/23/throwback-thursda...

EDIT 2: Why is everyone down-voting me? Do you all really think the UI is great? And that a mobile-unfriendly site is ok in 2016???

EDIT 3: OP's site kettlerusa.com has crashed now. Shows that it was ill prepared for a traffic surge (from HN). Also implies caching and scaling was not addressed. So how does show that this old programmer has "kept up to date"? Caching is very basic.

In the absence of other information, I'd chalk that up more to the client. This is a shopping site for the US arm of a German manufacturer. Cutting-edge design was probably not of high importance to them. Also, I don't see any claims by this person that they were a designer.

What your criticism reads like is a pretty good example of how things like ageism, sexism, or racism sometimes play out. Take something, find some fault with it, exaggerate its significance, and ascribe the source of that fault to an immutable characteristic of the person involved.

> In the absence of other information, I'd chalk that up more to the client.

That is my first thought as well.

Spending time optimizing it for performance may not be worthwhile for the client. Likewise, hosting it in a way that can scale to several times the traffic may not be worthwhile.

This is something you learn with experience. If you deliver a site that's super-fast, with deployment of the latest serverless architecture with the newest UI framework released this week.. but you didn't have time to put in half the catalog, the client is not going to be happy at all.

There are also clients that insist on certain specific things that may not fit with your artistic vision (specific graphics, colors, logo, text, layouts, icons, etc). You have to balance how hard you push back with how much you want to risk pissing off and/or losing the client.

There is no truth to what Zuckerberg said - the guy has said many idiotic things in his life, and this one ranks near the top. You're picking the author's website as an example, but it's a single datapoint - not representative of anything. Many younger people code much worse things, and many older people code much better things.

I'm slowly reaching 30 (agh), and I refuse to work in any team that doesn't have any members above at least 40. In all the teams that I've worked in, having people in the team (not necessarily management) who have been around for more than a few decades has always been extremely valuable. My best managers have been a man in his 50s, and a woman in her 60s. My worse managers and colleagues have consistently been too young and too inexperienced and too cocky.

It's not what he said so much as that he said it out loud to a room full of people and no one batted an eyelid.

Imagine the shitstorm if he had said "whites are just smarter" - the lack thereof demonstrates that the ageism problem is very real (probably the only form of discrimination left).

If I was to meet Zuckerberg I'd quiz him on that quote and ask him, did you A/B test that? If he did boy would he be in for a surprise ;<).

> but it's a single datapoint

Thanks. But isn't your experience with very old managers also a single datapoint, or at best, a dozen datapoints?

I have a few hundred data points of coworkers in my career at this point (maybe even low thousands), and the number of "out of touch old guy" I've encountered pales in comparison to the number of "arrogant clueless young guy" I've had to bear. (interestingly enough, I've had many good female colleagues, a few great ones, and no terrible ones)

>I've had many good female colleagues, a few great ones, and no terrible ones)

Pretty much the same here. It's a disappointing confirmation of the idea to survive a woman has to be twice as good.

I didn't downvote you, but your claims (and Zuckerberg's) about the intelligence and aptitude of us old folks (I'm not even 40 yet) are just absurd.

As regards UI, usability and the like, your comment is highly subjective and entirely unsubstantiated.

And your comment in your third edit is just as absurd as your notions about old folks: the site's author(s) likely never intended the site to be part of, e.g., a HN surge. A good number of the application backends I've written were never meant to be exposed to that kind of surge, and I didn't design these backends to handle that kind of surge because it wasn't necessary. That you think it is demonstrates more about your lack of understanding of engineering fundamentals than it does about old folks' ability to learn and adapt.

> but your claims (and Zuckerberg's) about the intelligence and aptitude of us old folks (I'm not even 40 yet) are just absurd.

I never made this claim. OP's post makes this claim.

I don't think we'd better start identifying look-and-feel of websites with programming skill.

One thing I've noticed whilst becoming older as a programmer is what pleasure I take in certain sorts of what people call "rookie" errors.

> is what pleasure I take in certain sort of what people call "rookie" errors.

Can you provide an example?

Such examples all have troll power so I might need a dispensation.

Dispensation offerred.

Ok! Well some that come to mind are (a) short variable names; (b) not bothering to encapsulate state or lock things down into modules; and (c) tables for layout.

I don't do these things because they're 'rookie mistakes', of course, just like I don't order whipped cream for dessert but might like it as an extra. I enjoy the feeling of lightness that comes with naively doing what's easy, as opposed to the weight of preconceptions that in practice impede the work.

My thoughts:

"Current tech trends in terms of UI" are generally antithetical to usability. Speed is an important aspect of usability, and web sites and mobile apps are as slow and unresponsive as they've ever been.

Like security, performance is a holistic concern; it cuts across layers abstraction (your "stack"). Because even good software is so layered these days, a younger programmer is less likely to have visited enough areas of the stack to form good mental models about performance.

On looking at the site you point out, I think it could use some CSS changes, but that's usually in the domain of design and not engineering.

> Speed is an important aspect of usability.

Agreed. But I couldn't bring myself to get past the ugly UI and get to performance testing, bundling / minifications, async calls etc.

Well the site (kettlerusa.com) has crashed now...

Does it escape you that you're on HackerNews? It's not the pinnacle of design by any stretch of the imagination, yet here we are...

Function over form.

What is the objective measure of "ugliness"? I found the site to be well-organized and intuitive. In less than ten seconds I understood what kind of products they were selling, how to buy them, and how to find out more about the company. As a _user_ the site was _effective_. Oh, and free shipping for orders over $40! Knowing this up front (because my attention was drawn to it) could very well influence my buying decision.

It's a shopping site for a manufacturing concern, how should it look? It seems functional, I can find products on it, what else does it need?

Looks fine to me. Ikea's site looks similar (to my eyes at least), btw. And nothing like the 90's whitehouse site.

There's a lot of niche sites that get the job done without following all the latest "trends". More power to them.

Function over form FTW.

The site looks fine. I can easily pay $0-$10 to get a super nice HTML5 site that would look great because it was made by a professional designer, then tweak it a little to make it look somewhat unique in a 10th of the time. Eye candy sells, but it is cheap. Most people would be better suited concentrating on back end abilities; it's generally a much more valuable skill set.

> I understand I will be in your shoes in 4 decades

So you're 17?

Google's landing page.

Your argument is invalid.

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