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Comment by tjr | Hacker News Reader

I was recently working with an older developer. I don't know, maybe of 65 or 70 years. He was working on aerospace network intrusion detection systems, and I was helping him set up a simulation system. He was slinging around low-level computer architecture terminology, while I was quickly trying to access what I remembered from a college class 15 years prior, just to keep up with the conversation.

Older programmers are worthless, simply due to their age? Ridiculous. I hope to someday be as skillful as this guy.

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It's a weird experience if you're a clever youngster. I liken it to speed vs torque. I have to rely on being fast and being able to scan a problem as fast as I can to understand it. But an older engineer will just know the lay of the land. I had this happen a lot with an older electrical engineer. He seemed slow and I looked to run circles around everyone, but he could point to things as a root cause before I even understood the problem. I would have to spend time to decompress his observations to backtrack how he figured it out, and you start to realize that his shortcuts and heuristics are just so much better than mine. I wish all young engineers to have the opportunity to be whooped by the tortoise.

Sometimes I would spot something he didn't, but it was frequently because I was approaching from a position of ignorance. It worried me that someday I'll lose that edge, but I guess it's why a good team will be diverse and balanced.

sounds like your approach complimented his as much as his complemented yours!

This is fundamentally true and basically is a great anecdotal argument for why we have the concept of a PE.

Edit: Context is America and also obviously this isn't a thing in software but is very much the normal way of doing business in classical engineering.

Where I work now we have PE's in software roles and I'm in America.

What is a PE?

Professional Engineer. It's an anointed position from an association of engineers, like an old-time guild. There's a duty to mentor youngsters, and a requirement for youngsters to spend time being mentored before getting PE status themselves.

I don't believe the concept of PE extends to software. I know its true for architecture, you need a PE to sign off on big structures.

I would LOVE to have it in software.

> I would LOVE to have it in software.

Sounds good at first thought. Reliable quality and ethics for software engineers, right?

On the other hand, you're inviting a special interest group to restrict the supply of software engineers and dictate university curricula. These professional programs/societies tend to be very conservative (engineers, doctors, lawyers) and have their members' interests possibly before society as a whole. Overall it probably still makes sense for the traditional professions.

But as a CS prof watching my engineering academic neighbors struggle with scheduling, staffing and difficulty updating things, I really don't want the external constraints on our academic program.

Overall, the community has not yet agreed that professional software engineering is a thing, though there have been several attempts to kick start it.

I hope he clarifies, but I think it stands for Principal Engineer.

Yup, I worked with some grey-beards in the GPU space and holy shit did they know their stuff, root causes and the like. My experience mirrored yours almost exactly.

The best ones are also pretty enthusiastic to share and educate. This group was very much like that and I'm incredibly grateful for all the things I learned.

>root causes Maybe years of tracking down bugs has a payoff

I'm on the opposite end of this as I'm pushing 40. It's like speed chess vs chess over snail mail. I tend to see all the way to the end of a problem within moments of hearing about it, already formulating solutions to edge cases 10 steps ahead while others seem to ask almost quaint questions about the first step. They spin very quickly while I don't appear to be doing anything at all, yet I often go completely around a problem. It generally takes me longer to explain how I arrived at the solution than it does to just solve it. But I've been trying to be more communicative, to work in a more communal way so that others can participate and I can count on them.

Of course nobody believes me about any of this and I've long given up trying to explain. I just quietly go about my work. It's frustrating though because I have no real leverage, no way to demonstrate my experience other than to just keep plodding odd glacially. I've utterly failed in any kind of management role but at the same time am having a hard time letting go of being a "hands on" dev in the trenches. I just hope that the level playing field of the internet dissolves agism before I'm faced with its ramifications.

An added bonus of brain age is being able to remember people's names. I never used to be able to do that, and I never tried to learn. It just happened one day. I guess I care more about people now and it seems like the least I can do is remember their fricken name.

My friend would always talk about old war stories. And he'd repeat too :) But his son said jokingly over lunch with him, "Always suffer an old geek." And I've never regretted it.

Keep trying to share what you know. He couldn't figure how to teach what he knows either, but really I think mentorship is more about showing and sharing. You'll find someone who appreciates the skill, and you'll be that guy who sets them on track for their career.

Also kudos on the name memory; I have been well instructed by every good engineer that clearly mirroring people's name back. I don't, but I see how much that helps (just wish I could memorize labels).

I wonder often how often cliquishness gets interpreted as agism, but in either case, being an aging white male in the tech business has given me a new perspective on the merits of workplace diversity :)

This whole idea of going after young fresh graduates is a ploy from the likes of Facebook or Google to increase their outreach and expand the talentpool they could source from. They are the ones that are on high towers and need people who know react or polymer or stuff like that.

Startups usually, though anecdotal, don't discriminate based on age or length of experience. In fact most of the awesome startups that I know hired solely based on experience and that "fit" into the cultural diversity of the company.

I feel like in the startup space a lot of young people just aren't exposed to just how good highly experienced engineers can be. As a result, they end up just hiring the best youngsters they can find (and afford) and dismiss a lot of people as dated.

It's just breathtaking when you watch an experienced engineer slap together a well architected, highly optimized project that passes all tests on the first try. They even keep track of things like code size in the cache, opportunities for vectorization, etc.

Elsewhere in the threads here someone noted that a lot of young teams don't have upper managers. And frankly, I'd believe many simply don't have any proper management.

Where "proper" is critical. I've had a lot of managers, but few effective ones. And almost none who led the department. I found my mentors in other departments. It's a real shame, since a great manager will do more for learning and quality of life than anything else, I think.

Yep, in contrast to the current unfortunate common practice of "hire in quantity and brute force your way to a working app". I've seen places where copy-pasting from StackOverflow was the norm and "getting it to compile" was seen as a milestone worthy of congratulation.

My father is still a practicing mechanical engineer in his 70s. The 20-something engineers use words like "awesome" to describe him. Of course it helps that his brilliance is God-tier, even without the decades of experience, but still.

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