Comment by anon284271 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon284271 | Hacker News Reader

I believe (vanilla) software development is a young man's/woman's game. I realized this last year at age 38 and I've been rapidly trying to alter my career trajectory.

- If you aren't a specialist, you are constantly competing against 20-somethings who will always be more current in their skills and breadth than yourself, because they have more free time than you have (e.g. I have a wife, kid)

- I've written GUI widgets from scratch, servers from scratch, same thing with linked lists, sorting, etc. Guess what? That doesn't likely justify an ever-increasing salary. No one cares.

- Older programmers tend to be very opinionated and have lots of war stories. This gets on peoples nerves. The stereotype, based entirely on truth, is that they are cranky and hard to work with.

I don't believe the same is true in specialized disciplines like engineering or modelling/simulation, numerical programming, etc. A 40, 50, 60 year-old engineer/mathematician/analytics developer doesn't have the same stigma. Those decades of experience are invaluable. The fundamentals of engineering or statistics aren't being reinvented every 3-5 years. Web development skills that are 5 years old are literally worthless today. Aside from general problem solving techniques, unless you've really specialized, the stuff you developed 10-20 years ago is of minimal value today and that experience (writing software that is now obsolete and could now be written in a fraction of the time, likely!) doesn't make you competitive against younger programmers.

My takeaway was to go deep as possible into analytics and math. AI, ML, anything that requires heavy math background, those are what I'm focusing on now.

Younger developers are way more naive and out to prove their skills by engaging in any fool's errand they are presented with. Older folks have a lot of heuristics and experience that pushes them away from conventional collaboration and makes them unwilling to engage in negative work or emotional labour.

There is definitely a middle ground, I believe emotional agility is at the heart of 'true' agility and the emotions have been highly overlooked by people who either master the art of bottling it up (looking at you former managers) or brooding (that's on me and many of us I believe)

The middle ground is becoming aware of the spectrum of unpleasant emotions and learning to feel in more depth while using intellect to guide your own actions.

For example, one can sense disgust at a certain codebase. That's perfectly acceptable, and it doesn't have to be anyone's fault. The disgust will drive us to want to improve it. Unfortunately, our managers tell us `bottle up your disgust and do some more disgusting things so we can ship` in which case young guys jump to the challenge and old guys tend to feel completely undervalued.

Edit: this statement is intentionally opinionated. It's alright to have an emotional reaction to it. I'd be interested to know what emotions it evokes in the reader.

The stereotype, based entirely on truth, is that they are cranky and hard to work with.

That's kind of full on ageism don't you think? I am an older developer and I am easier going than some younger members of my team who are very aggressive and overly emotional when discussing technical problems.

An example for your specialist skillset theory: Simon Marlow being hired by Facebook. Guarantee he's raking in the dough. Why? He solves hard problems.

I have the opposite experience to be honest. I'm 42 and don't see anyone being way ahead of me due to their age or stamina. Maybe its because I didn't start this career until my mid 30s though.

in my view, the grays are better at vanilla development, while the upstarts want to spend their time diving into an endless parade of frameworks. freaking annoying.

You could easily go into Business Intelligence. That area is full of consultants who get tons of cash for just knowing a single database or application and spending their days at customers helping them use it properly.

> I believe (vanilla) software development is a young man's/woman's game. I realized this last year at age 38 and I've been rapidly trying to alter my career trajectory.

Whether you think you can, or think you cannot: you're probably right.

How come I came to the opposite conclusion as you with similiar family obligations...where else can you earn 120k USD and work remote to spend time raising your children and banging your wife in between coding sessions throughout the day

> If you aren't a specialist, you are constantly competing against 20-somethings who will always be more current in their skills and breadth than yourself, because they have more free time than you have (e.g. I have a wife, kid)

I'm assuming that your wife is stay at home? In which case you would have more free time, not less.

On the other hand, if she works... then I understand.

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