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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.

If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place.

Also if you're 50 and are relying on a new job's retirement program you're probably in for a rude awakening about when you can retire. That should be pretty close to set by that point. If it's not, the difference between matching 4% or 3%, or 75% match v. 100% is not going to be shaving more than a few months off your working career.

> They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues.

I'm pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don't think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone's age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.

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I'm 63 with a BS in Chemistry and MS in Environmental Systems Engineer. I was a student teacher of microbiology when I was in graduate school. I started coding fortran in HS about 1969 or 1970.

> I'm pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don't think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone's age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.

I run 134+ branded sites (and maybe 20+ other misc sites) some of which do extensive search marketing (extensive for a university). I am a digital native as much as the next person regardless of age.

Sorry, you run 154+ sites?

Sure do.

I thought I was busy with ~10.

It is not that bad. All are in a push CMS. We have a staff for content and UX. Many sites are small. Probably total 15,000 pages for all sites.

These are univeristy sites so they are not complex apps. But there is a lot of backend code and middleware for pushing files to the CDN and to an xml database.

All right. I'll be honest, I forgot what thread we were on, I was just in awe at all of the sites you run. My next thought was, "man, I wish I could use some guy like him, but he is just too expensive."

One thing is for sure: there are definitely, 100%, no-questions about it, over 1 people who can be reached and who, at least for a few months, would take over 15,000 pages and 154+ sites. (An early 20s hacker). For under $30,000.

That excludes nearly everybody: but not everybody. There is 1 person you can find who can do it.

However, that one person is not going to be over 50. Over 50 people "aren't stupid" and are not going to do that for you for $30,000 and no other compensation.

You can say under twenty people will be "stupid enough" that you can find someone to do it. But more accurately, they have different motivations. There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000 doing a job that's worth half a million, when your friends are earning $20,000 as barristas at starbucks. People's lives change over time. . . .

"There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000 doing a job that's worth half a million, when your friends are earning $20,000 as barristas at starbucks."

That's patently false. Undervaluing your labor because your friends work in a poorly compensated industry makes no sense. If anything the money you are earning when you are younger is more important to secure for ROI purposes.

All right: to the best of my current understanding, there is nothing wrong with ever taking a salary vastly under market in one's twenties, including literally performing CTO-level work worth half a million and equal to the work of many developers under you (or hell, even leading or directing them), for $30,000. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's not a bad life choice. Especially if one's social life is also important and includes many other twenty-somethings in various professions.

we're just going to disagree if you think otherwise - we don't have to get into an argument about it. In my world view not everything is about maximizing salary.

I don't think you're wrong, per se, but barring that I'm really unclear on what point you're trying to make.

my only point is that the supply at that price is greater than 0 - that some people will do it. who are in their twenties. you won't find someone even over thirty willing to do it though. it's a descriptive statement.

Seems to me that the number of retired engineers working as Wal-Mart greeters is actually more than one, and has been for a while.

Why would they do that?

Maybe they just want to get out of the house and do something useful?

Otherwise if it was for $$$s, and they aren't poor without a safety net, seems like they'd be better off learning higher value skills and getting a better job.

Why would they do that?

I've considered it, but I don't think I can do that work.

I'm not actually retired, and may never be able to, because of a catastrophic health event around twelve years ago. I get paid very well when I'm working, and that plus learned frugality and a supportive family has enabled me to get by pretty comfortably, but the same health catastrophe created a situation in which it's quite difficult to find people who want to hire me. That difficulty is increased by a couple of other personal limitations that don't hamper my productivity (I can be outstandingly productive given the right tools, goals, and situation), but the right combination of things is just a little different from and more specific than the common default, and that's enough to have a strong negative effect on my chances of being hired. I'm a white crow, is what it comes down to--or a nail that sticks up.

My solution so far is to take work I'm likely to excel at when I can get it, and especially when people are comfortable paying me on par with what I've been usually been paid before (because it's good pay), but to be open to any steady work of any kind that I think I can do, because I also often have to weather extended periods of no work. The longest so far has been a little over two years.

Oh, and of course I'm always working on projects meant to become things that will generate residual income in the long run.

I would certainly work as a Wal-Mart greeter if I thought I could do it. There are a lot of other low-paying jobs that I would do if I thought I could do them. The main problem with low-paying jobs is that a lot of them require sustained physical exertion that I can't do, or rigid work schedules that I can't observe, or both.

? but they wouldn't take a job as an engineer at that same salary; whereas a kid who is working as a wal-mart shop cart person or cashier, would do CTO-level technical work (if they happened to be able to) for the same salary -- or more precisely the number of such kids who are willing to is not exactly 0. It is larger than strictly zero.

I feel like you're not fully articulating your point here; in what circumstance would prioritizing leisure entail working for 6% of one's market value?

doesn't really matter. as I just wrote, my only point is that the supply at that price is greater than 0 - that some people will do it. who are in their twenties. you won't find someone even over thirty willing to do it though. it's a descriptive statement.

Are you sure the people that will do it are the ones you want to be doing it (if you are paying?). If they are so vastly underestimating their market value, perhaps it's because they are actually vastly overestimating their ability.

I have to agree with the perhaps inappropriately named logicallee. And I'd go further - it's not just a matter of age, nor (as others in this thread have said) of inability or stupidity, if someone works for a salary under market value. I am far from the best at my job in the world, but I'm ok, and for the longest time as a freelancer I charged way under the market (in fact I suspect I still do, though not so egregiously). This was - I think - not because I "overestimated my ability" or anything like that. I was simply not a business-minded person. I was afraid to ask for more. I earned enough to live from, and the rest seemed somehow distasteful to me. I'm not saying this is the ideal, just a fact. And if I have these characteristics, perhaps others do too.

Once you find the person stupid enough to accept crap pay for doing something that earns you tons of profit - are you sure you found a person smart enough to do what you need?

There is a big difference between "how much value you create" and the percentage of that that you can capture for yourself.

In the non-labor market airlines a great example of this. They create tremendous value for their customers (fast long distance transportation), but the industry as a whole is not very profitable.

Same for employment. Many (hopefully most) employees generate more value than their salaries, but that does not mean they can negotiate for that value to be added to their salary. If there is someone else with similar capabilities willing to do the job at $x, then negotiating pay above $x will be difficult.

accepting "only" $30,000 at the age of 22 is a lot less stupid than accepting "only" $30,000 at the age of 52. people's lives and motivations are vastly different, especially the most qualified, smartest people's lives.

This is honestly the strangest logic I've read on this site. You're basically arguing for exploiting workers by undervaluing them and saying it's ok because people's lives change?

it's just a descriptive statement about the market. for that matter, how many 50+ year olds even apply to be barristas at starbucks? perhaps nobody should work at a starbucks as a barrista, but we're not exactly going to blame everyone who does so in their twenties.

The biggest problem with "Hire someone super smart at a vastly-under-market rate." is that some other company will come along tomorrow and offer them market, and the best case is that they give you two weeks notice before jumping ship.

The worst case[0] is that they don't show up the next day and you are SOL.

0. Assuming they don't actively try to sabotage the company that has been exploiting them.

this is also the same reason why 'overqualified' is an actual concern.

people at the bottom of the totem pole view money as simply a scarce resource -- when it becomes somewhat more abundant, you have other things to worry about and it becomes a means to an end of hiring and retaining good, reliable people.

one way of doing this is not to substantially underpay someone who's worth a lot more on the open market, because eventually it will bite you in the ass.

Is it just me or does this comment make no sense at all?

> There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000

No, it's just rational as an individual, yet it ends up driving down wages. If, as a group, this kind of pay was shunned, that wouldn't happen. Don't devalue your job, wait it out.

Employers are in a better position to divide and conquer, than employees are to unionize.

so you're the exception to the norm; you're one data point against... ;)

You might be right. I run circles around some of the youngsters I work with. Yet I still feel like an imposter.

is he though? i mean, are you sure about the norm? meet a young colleague who doesn't understand search, you'll say "he has no clue about search". meet an older colleague and you might say "he's too old to understand search".

Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/385/

I am 55, CS degree, and also a digital native. I run a digital agency. In this past year, I've been the technical decision maker for development efforts for over 20 web sites/applications, full stack. I can work with decision makers, and I can deep dive to any place in the web stack. I was the technical lead on a cloud deployment for a $1bn government contractor. I have a business partner and am also in the early stages of a SaaS startup.

My point. Nobody will ever dictate what I can and cannot do in this complex, wonderful, and growing digital space. Ever.

The norm? Which would be the general public? I think you will find anyone who can solve an equation is an exception to the norm. A computer programmer of ANY competence, even an amateur 12 year old, is 3 standard deviations outside the norm. And if you're going to restrict your norm to just computer professionals... you'd best run some numbers before making assumptions.

I am 49 and have a CS Degree, ~25 years experience. I run my own mobile/web development company out of my home, making more money than I ever have before. I've been in business for about 3 years and each year my revenue increases by 20-30% I am principle architect and coder.

In order to do this, I have had to learn new languages, frameworks and new ways of thinking about things. Some of those "new" things weren't difficult, they just required tweaking old ways of looking at things.

For example, older mobile devices are resource constrained. Having to think about conservation while coding isn't new. I started my career coding on shitty MS Dos system where if you had 640K of memory, it was a high-end machine. The tweaking comes in with the addition of other constrains such as battery life, coalescing radio usage and the fact that the OS can decide to shut down your app and restart it at any time, but the user's expectation is it should be the way the just left it.

Continually learning and reinventing myself is just the way things are now. If you haven't had to deal with that yet, just wait. It will come.

You are a hero. I won't be hitting your age for more than a decade, but you are giving me hope.

Young ones may be born into this. Older ones are the ones who created this.

I'm a developer and am currently 47 (about to be 48). I'm the youngest developer in my department (basically call processing) where we work with C, C++ and Lua (which I introduced into the company). Down the hall is another department writing software to be embedded in Android phones (Java, obviously). With one exception (I think he's 30 ... maybe) the average age is mid-50s. The department working on the UI (HTML, CSS and Javascript) are in their 40s, like the department working on the (non-call processing) servers (Java mostly).

>I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.

I completely agree (I'm 32), but what is worrying is the possibility of a fundamental shift that doesn't occur within individual companies but rather manifests itself as a new industry of sorts, and then a slow decline of the industry we're in right now - a paradigm shift, for a lack of a better term. That one is harder to detect until it's blatantly obvious, at which point the early practitioners in the new industry are now the senior engineers and newly minted college graduates are overwhelmingly starting their career in the new industry. Developers in the old industry have to cling on to whatever jobs are left or start over.

My uncle is a good example of this - he's in his 50s and has spent most of his career working in what are now ancient IBM technology stacks (ever hear of RPG?) He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad. When there were finally no jobs left near him for working in this IBM stack, he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut basically starting over.

It's not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse). What experience ends up transferring to the new industry? Soft skills, perhaps, but lots of people outside either the old or new industry have good soft skills experience, so what do you bring to the table that they don't?

This isn't an "age problem." It's something deeper than that. If my uncle had jumped ship from his IBM world and into e-commerce in the 90s, which he was perfectly capable of doing, he would probably be a senior leader somewhere right now. But how could he have known? When the .com bubble burst, he probably felt vindicated in his decision to stay put.

How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I'm not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?

edit: grammar

> It's not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse).

If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.

> How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I'm not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?

Thankfully, these days we have data scientists who examine trends in framework and methodology assimilation for fun and publicity. We have metrics like GitHub stars, Stackoverflow questions, and Google Trends to clue us in on the popularity and profitability of new ways of doing things.

> It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.

I don't know if I agree with that. When I was 25, I was all over every new technology that came out. I was the expert in my group. I'm now pushing 50. The latest tech isn't nearly as interesting. And honestly, I'm getting tired of chasing it. My energy level has dropped a bit. Physically I'm not in as good a shape (though still quite healthy). The effects of age are very real.

You're right, and it's not just the affects of age. As I have gotten older, my responsibilities have become more diverse - Outside of work, I am a husband, parent, and bible study teacher. Much of the time I used to spend playing with new technology are now spent in those roles.

You also mentioned getting tired of the chase. It's hard not to get jaded about the newest javascript framework (for example) when we have been reinventing these wheels in our industry since the 50's. Whenever the next big thing pops up, it will arise out of the oeuvre of a lot of stuff that - taken individually - are a dead ends.

Another way to put it is that the 25 year old thinks all the shiny new technologies are important. The 50 year old knows better.

I'm 51. Many, maybe most of the tech that's fundamental to my career didn't even exist when my career started. Only Unix and SQL have been constants. http was a lab experiment. The Mosaic browser didn't exist yet. Java? Ruby? NoSQL? Whatever.

If you need to learn a tech to solve a problem, you learn a tech. It's not hard.

What I find interesting isn't new technologies. It's new problems, problems that didn't exist before (often because they're the result of new tech), or problems that could not be addressed before (due to limits of computational power or data access).

I'm your age, and I think a good example of what you're talking about is javascript frameworks. Younger programmers might dissect each one and suss out the details like any of us might have done with CONFIG.SYS, but as an older programmer they all seem essentially similar and as far as professional skills go I can probably either just choose one or wait until the dominant one shakes out. This of course is aided by my sense/prediction/bigotry that JS frameworks are following Hotelling's Law.

You're mostly right, but that means you're missing an extremely important piece of the picture.

Both the browser and Node provide hardly any structure at all compared to Cocoa, WinForms, or even the Java standard library. Experienced developers recoil because it feels like building a house with hand tools, compared to having a team of contractors at your disposal.

This results in JavaScript developers building their own tools. That's why there are so many of them. In iOS no one writes a GUI toolkit, because Apple already provided one and it's pretty good. People have their complaints but they're rarely serious enough to warrant throwing the whole stack away.

In that sense these more robust platforms are superior. But the JavaScript world is like a giant evolutionary system trying all ideas at once, at almost every level of the stack. Lots of repetition, lots of death, but also WAY more ideas floating around.

JavaScript frameworks all look the same to outsiders because they mostly are. But they are different in subtle ways that you simply can't explore on iOS because Apple already decided where the major architectural boundaries will be.

There are painful tradeoffs on the JavaScript side, but I think in the long run the fundamental advantages will become enormous. I believe the web a disruptive (to native) technology in the Innovators Dilemma sense, but we're still very early on the adoption curve. Only a fraction of a percent of people use the web's most powerful feature, which is JavaScript functions.

> Only a fraction of a percent of people use the web's most powerful feature, which is JavaScript functions.

…What!?

Most web users at best write a little html. Very few do any programming.

At 25 everything seems new and exiciting, now in my mid 30's I'm starting to see new tech as just a new spin on old ideas. If you were familiar with smalltalk for instance, you probably wouldn't have found java or .net particularly exciting, you probably wouldn't have as hard a time picking it up either.

I think every 50 year old is different. A fifty year old who did some regular exercise, is different than a guy who spent the last thirty years sitting at a desk?

When I was younger, I thought most people over 30 were basically worthless. As I've aged, I changed that up a bit.

Young and old have their place.

When I was in my twenties, and thirties; you couldn't pay me to sit in front of a computer--literally.

What was I interested in? Guess? Girls! And then Girls! And then anything other than sitting at a desk all day, especially looking into a screen. Was I entitled? A bit?

Only as I aged, did computer science become palatable. Do I love it? No, but I haven't loved anything besides a few family members, and my pets.

I think where Hiring Managers get it wrong is assuming all young people will be Rock Stars, with great ideas. They will be happy with free food, and lofty promises. I never bought it. I took what I wanted. I smiled, looked promising, but hated my employers. I would not want to hire myself after college. I finished college ready for med school, and looked back, and could count on my hands what courses weren't a waste of time. I was dissalusioned.

I do think the best ideas still come from mainly young people, but separating the the best from the herd is impossible.

Peter Thiel has the money to throw at young people, and wait for the shooting star. He knows that combination of being young, hormones at full throttle, and angst; might just produce another Mark Zuckerburg. (I used Mark, but he might have just stole an idea, and got very lucky? I honestly haven't figured it out.)

And to be perfectly honest; the young guys, I know, who became rich--all had wealthy enabling fathers. The more I think about it, it was their fathers(50 plus) who provided the idea, and capital, but weren't willing to give up their day gig to see their product through.

The ageism won't go away soon.

I think it will take another five to ten years for the industry to realize you don't need to fire programmer at 40, but who knows?

I personally think in a decade, this profession will be talked about in the past tense. Yes, a few will always have a secure job, but most jobs will be contracted out to the lowest bidder.

Hell, I don't think it will be ten years. Once "Let it go whatever", rehashedidea.com, etc. run out of free money; we will have a huge group of dissalusioned 25-35 year olds. Many will be homeless? Many talking about the good ole days when companies treated you like you were a valuable commodity.

"Rember the free stuff?"

Your writing style is really enjoyable to read.

> And honestly, I'm getting tired of chasing it. My energy level has dropped a bit. Physically I'm not in as good a shape (though still quite healthy). The effects of age are very real.

But that's also experience. There is a sameness both the 'new thing' cycle and the new things themselves that largely becomes apparent as we accumulate experience -- which happens to coincide with years, but I don't think it's the years that are the cause.) From that perspective it seems logical to be less interested in chasing all the new things.

So far I've found (~10 yr. younger than you) that if something comes along that is sufficiently interesting, I dive into it just as deeply as ever -- but I'm a fair bit more discerning about what I find sufficiently interesting.

Even at 25 I wasn't interested in the new tech. Uh oh. Oh well. Anybody up for some hacking around with bits?

> If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.

I might be wrong, but I got the sense that the comment you're responding to is trying to make the exact same point. It even says that one point that the uncle's age was completely irrelevant to his not learning the newer technologies.

I'm pretty confident that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will NOT be big in 2035. Computers will probably have evolved into pretty different forms, and we'll have different ways of interacting with them.

However, the principles of engineering good computing systems will probably be pretty similar. And the higher level skills needed to be a good engineer will almost certainly be the same.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss soft skills as easy to pick up - well, maybe you mean soft skills like basic verbal and written communication, in which case, sure, they can be learned pretty easily. But there are a lot of very valuable "soft" skills that fall under the realm of engineering wisdom and experience.

A senior engineer can add a huge amount of value for a team - justifying a huge pay check - by having a good sense for how to design things to allow for greater productivity, when to be extra paranoid about failures, which corners can safely be cut, or how to avoid subtle but devastating pitfalls in a given domain or platform.

I think most professions are a bit pyramid shaped, with lots of people whose career trajectories don't always go up and to the right. Software development probably has a bit more of a plateau than some, but it's not the only one. Architecture, for example, is very cutthroat, with a handful of senior people who do very well, and an awful lot of disappointed later-career professionals. Even at big corporate law firms things are pretty much up or out - not everyone makes partner, and not every partner makes senior partner.

I think across all of these professions, if you want to keep moving up and/or stay highly employable (and that's a big if), then you have to always be thinking about trends in the market for your skills, and how you can stay ahead of them. It's not that different from a company thinking about how their products can continue to stay competitive in a changing market.

I had a six month co-op in college where I worked for a major defense contractor working on software for an embedded system. I really enjoyed the work and had a few offers from defense contractors doing embedded development when I graduated but ultimately decided on going to work for a growing e-commerce company near Boston. My primary reason for not going back into the defense industry despite enjoying the work was because I saw that kind of work as too unstable and career limiting going forward.

I have to say that based on my experience I believe very little meta engineering skills would transfer between these two industries. The way software is written for a full authority digital engine control and the way software is written for an e-commerce website have very little in common other than they are both called "software engineering." The process is immensely different, the technology is immensely different, testing is immensely different, integration is immensely different. It's a different universe. If I went back to work for one of those companies I would be starting from the bottom - if they would even hire me. Yes, if you squint really hard, you can see parallels in the two industries - they both test, for example - but to try to extrapolate beyond that is... well, quite a big pitfall.

The things you mentioned - a good sense for designing things for greater productivity, where to be paranoid about failures, what corners can be safely cut, or where the pitfalls are - are extremely different between the two industries.

The nature of computation opens up a boundless universe of possible ways to both run a software project and build a software project. This sets us apart from other engineering disciplines -- there are a limitless number of ways to architect almost any software project, but there are only so many safe ways to build a bridge.

This allows our industry to fork off into places we can't possibly imagine today. I agree with you that in 2035, our field will be very different.

> He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad

for how long ? I dont blame him for reading about C++ in 1989 and saying "hrmmmf! hogwash!". But in 1995 ? in 2000 ? It sounds like he got set in his ways, and how is that NOT an "age problem" ? I'm also 32, and I'm getting slightly more set in my ways as I get older.

> he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut basically starting over.

well, had he had an open mind and not shunned new things, he might be a Herb Sutter today. Or even in IBM, had he bet on a different "horse", and moved into As/400 or whatever other IBM technologies there are, he could be earning more than a C++ programmer, knowing some obscure proprietary IBM language and having 20+ years experience backing it up. I've heard of guys like that making $100+/hr because only a few people in the world can do it.

I think his story is one of mismanagement of intellectual capital. Maybe it's naive of me, but I dont see how you could be in software engineering for 30 years and not be worth at least a million, especially from his era. Did he invest in IBM or any tech companies at all ? How could you not see everyone making money in the dot-com era and not be a part of it ?

I've got a year on you and I think I'd agree that OO is snake oil. The worst code bases I've ever seen (and I've seen some horrors) have been from over used inheritance and mixing logic and data. Provided you avoid global state (also a problem with OO) I think a c program would be more understandable than a lot of java/c# ones.

Not to say there aren't useful features, that would go well with a language like c, like interfaces, but I'd love to get rid of inheritance, encapsulation and mixing data and code.

From what you are saying I guess you have never been in an OO project but you just worked in the "cold hell" of procedOOral code, the worst mix of copy and paste, overblown inheritance and singletons. I experienced a lot of it in my career, nowadays I am more oriented towards the functional world, but saying that OO is completely useless and even dangerous is an outright lie. The most awful codebases on which I worked on would have been quite nice applying the OO best practices. Sadly they where far too big to be changed by the concerted effort of a couple of people. And they were full of anti-patterns. Even loving the type safety of F# and Haskell I can't honestly say that OO is an anti-pattern per se. What it matters is not the size of the hammer but how you use it. But I can rightfully proclaim that the wrong tools used for something that they were never meant for are the worst possible solution. EVER.

I've spent 10+ years of my career working in OO languages, I'm no stranger to it and I've seen it used well. But we'll tends to be a subset of OO, with minimal inheritance and encapsulation with data and logic in seperate places.

it could very well be snake oil, but I make a living doing it (or at least knowing how to answer C++ questions during interviews. many of my jobs were advertised as SE but really dont require much actual coding (to my frustration)) and I actually enjoy C++.

Personally, I think both java and javascript (yes I know they are entirely separate languages ) are snake oil. But you know, I learned to program in them anyway.

I tried to find a happy medium where I learn about a new technology and see if it sticks. If after 3-5 years its still around, I give it a try. This worked for me for javascript and python. When python first came out (or when I first heard of it ) I said "no way, not learning a new language right now. perl works fine as a scripting language". Then year after year I kept hearing about it, and heard about perl less and less. Then I finally tried it.

But a couple years ago, I kept hearing about "coffee script" and "clojure". I said the same thing, "not touching it". And now, I hardly ever hear about them, and I barely even know what they are.

You would probably enjoy Go, for the most part.

I've been thinking that. Rust is probably next on my list though.

>for how long ? I dont blame him for reading about C++ in 1989 and saying "hrmmmf! hogwash!". But in 1995 ? in 2000 ? It sounds like he got set in his ways, and how is that NOT an "age problem" ? I'm also 32, and I'm getting slightly more set in my ways as I get older.

Christmas of 2002.

>well, had he had an open mind and not shunned new things, he might be a Herb Sutter today. Or even in IBM, had he bet on a different "horse", and moved into As/400 or whatever other IBM technologies there are, he could be earning more than a C++ programmer, knowing some obscure proprietary IBM language and having 20+ years experience backing it up. I've heard of guys like that making $100+/hr because only a few people in the world can do it.

That's actually the big trap. He WAS making good money because of legacy systems and because not many people were familiar with the technology... right up until there were no jobs left. It makes changing fields earlier difficult even though it would have probably been the best long term strategy.

>I think his story is one of mismanagement of intellectual capital. Maybe it's naive of me, but I dont see how you could be in software engineering for 30 years and not be worth at least a million, especially from his era. Did he invest in IBM or any tech companies at all ? How could you not see everyone making money in the dot-com era and not be a part of it ?

I assume he's worth well over a million. It isn't enough to be worth a million when you are 50. When you and your wife will be living for (hopefully) another 30-40 years and social security doesn't kick in until 62-65, you gotta keep working unless you explicitly planned for an early retirement.

As for how to avoid the .com era - well, you miss it by seeing it as a bubble (and feel vindicated when it "pops" in 2001). You also miss it because you are committed to living in a certain geographic area without a significant presence of e-commerce companies.

"unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place."

I think that's a key thing to look at. There is only so much space at the top of the experience chain in most jobs. I doubt most companies need more than 1-2 senior software devs per 5 software devs.

Most companies are structured as a pyramid. Depending on the career path, it's about 1/5th the population for each rung up the ladder you climb. Not everyone should expect to climb to the top.

> I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.

I think the problem we run into is that neither can most people.

> If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place.

And, again, the issue is that most people honestly believe that they don't need the extra competency.

I work in a relatively enlightened group. People treat me with considerable respect and I feel that they value my experience (I'm knocking up against 50 years old). Even still, if I say, "You know what, I've tried that before a few times and it never seems to work out" nobody will accept it as an answer :-). These young guys all want/need to make their own mistakes.

Sometimes I've even run into situations where people are doing considerable damage to their careers by making bad choices. Explaining the situation often makes them very, very unhappy. You end up feeling like the dad on a team of teenagers where everyone deep down loves and respects you, but day to day hates your guts :-).

Since the field is growing so fast, we have this influx of young talent. They just can't see beyond where they will be in 5 years. Just the other day I saw an ad on Youtube for some programmer mill -- "I took a 10 month course and now I'm living my dream," kind of BS. Everybody wants to think that they are doing an awesome job and we have pushed back the bar for awesome a fairly long way. There's an expectation that you can do a boot camp, work for a year or two and then it's easy street from there.

The reality, of course, is that 30 years on I'm still reading and hacking and struggling and experimenting and learning -- and I've been doing it for 30 years. I look in awe at some people in the industry and wonder if I will be able to gain that kind of competency before I retire.

I think if I could sum up the advantage of being more experienced it would be to watch the classic movie, "The Seven Samurai", note who survives to the end, think about why they survive and remark on what they plan to do next.

> You know what, I've tried that before a few times and it never seems to work out" nobody will accept it as an answer

Because that's hand-wavy nonsense about "a few" data points. If you said that whatever you're discussing never worked out because of A, B, and C, and at least once of those is still an issue, then it would probably be accepted.

There are fundamentally two kinds of experienced people: Those with n years of experience, and those with m years of experience n/m times (where n >> m). Part of the only-somewhat-mythical recently-lost middle class compact was that you you train to do something, then work the rest of your life doing that. The former kind, the people who trained as electrical engineers in the 70s (because computer science wasn't invented then), then kept their skills up to date, will have very little trouble finding interesting and well-paid things to work on. The people who still think in terms of mainframes and consider tab-completion uncomfortable magic[1] won't. When, on top of that, they subscribe to the other part of said middle class compact, that your salary is supposed to keep going up (above inflation), then you have a recipe for disappointment.

Is there embarrassing ageism in tech? Undoubtedly. Does ageism explain all of why elder techies on average have trouble finding employment in 'new tech'? I strongly doubt it.

1: The number of ostensibly highly experienced Unix (retrained on Linux) system admins that I have personally, not even exaggerating, promise, taught to use tab completion in Bash in this decade is depressing.

I think the companies that hire an army of 23-25 year olds are planning to fail fast anyway. Why bother trying to recruit older, more senior talent that is going to expect higher benefits if the skills that they bring to the table vs. a 25 year old (knowledge of scalability, long-term decision making, planning, deep technical knowledge, etc.) aren't going to be used unless the company survives the first few years?

I was with you until the straw man in the last sentence. No one here is suggesting that age "precludes" you from understanding modern marketing media, only that it's less likely. Whether that's true or not is a question of actual data, not broad statements about ageism.

    I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) 
    and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference
    between 50 and 25 will be.

While it's true that there's some new tech/tools coming out, stuff doesn't necessarily change that much...I started working as a programmer at 18 (I'm 33 years old now) when the popular new thing was java.

In between I used many different languages and tools (c, c++, python, matlab, js, haxe, as3, in no particular order & probably some that I've forgotten) but now I'm using c# which very in-vogue in my line of work (game development, due to the popularity of unity) and it was a virtually seamless transition from java (I actually started using c#/.net in 2009 as a tools programmer independent of unity).

EDIT: nevermind, I realize now you meant you improved drastically in 5 years, not that the tech field has changed drastically.

    > If you're hiring 40-60 year
    > olds you cannot simply hire
    > a 25 year old and get an
    > "acceptable tradeoff of
    > competency"

I'm a much better developer than I was 10 years ago, and I was pretty damn good then, but even when I'm 50, there will be people whose talent and ways of thinking about programming at 25 will be much superior to mine.

And every year, my intuition about what constitutes bloat vs developer convenience, and when to just throw hardware (physical or cloud) at a problem that could be fixed via developer time, gets slight slightly more out of date.

I think you're suffering from selection bias.

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