Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

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Limited input data, but my sense is that this could have nothing much to do with age. You've been talking to people who say plain out illegal things in interviews (at least in the USA), and it sounds like you've been looking for jobs through "commodity" channels -- asking for "interview projects" to be done in two weeks, hiring for experience with very specific tech, and so on.

Recommendation: don't do that. Instead aim to get a job with people who value inherent capabilities and flexibility, and who aren't abusers. To do that you may need to do some work first. For example, develop a web application of your own, open source, using some modern tech stack (doesn't matter which specific one). Then, when you interview you can talk about your experiences, thoughts, etc with that tech. This shows the interviewer that you have the capability to pick up new tech, to understand its strengths and weaknesses, to produce output. A good interviewer will see that and know that you will therefore be able to pick up whatever tech they want you to use. It's not about specific knowledge and buzzwords : it's about the ability to learn and apply. You can now go into interviews with the approach : I don't know anything about some of the tech you're using, but that's ok because I have proven I can learn, and I know a huge amount about _something_, and perhaps the interviewer will be interested to learn from me about that.

One of the advantages of age is that you have had more time to meet more people, with with more people, build a network. Use those contacts to look for jobs rather than recruiters.

When you reach a certain age you have to play to your strengths and focus on the things you're good at doing. Sometimes when people hit their midlife crisis, they realize, I want to make hundreds of thousands of dollars for typing code too. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Arisaka1 Some people are "Ask HNers" and some people are "Show HNers".

l might be wrong,but it almost sounds like you're saying there's no room for middle aged people to switch to coding later in life. There can be many reasons people switch, not necessarily related to a crisis or monetary incentives. We need more coders, so why not let people learn.

> We need more coders

Who is "we" here?

How do you mean?

I'm wondering who is the "we" in the "we need more coders" part of your comment referring to. I can think of a few examples where some people might want more coders, but other might not:

1) Right now coders are in high demand. This means that they cost a lot. Recruiters might want more coders to be able to recruit people easier, companies might want more coders to reduce their price, and have more people working. On the other hand, coders themselves might not want more coders because it may reduce their earnings, and make it harder for them to get jobs.

2) Some people think that more software is good, and therefore we need more people producing it. On the other hand, some people think that "we should be more like engineers" and should gatekeep more, to increase the quality of the software. I'm not supporting either of those idea, just citing examples that I've seen, especially here on HN

3) A country might want more coders in general to increase its economy, especially if it's one where other countries can outsource work to. But on the other hand, it might also not want other countries that have a lower cost of living/salaries to have more coders, so they can keep work for themselves.

All of that to say that I'm not sure the sentiment of "we need more coders" is agreed upon by everyone, which is why I'm asking who you were referring to.

I agree 'we' is relative, on reflection. I meant in general terms only i.e., the need for more developers will increase as employers start to build more software, which is where I posit things are heading. I could be wrong of course.

I slightly regret adding that to my post now, as my main concern was with the over generalisation of the reasons why older people might switch to coding/development. Ironically, I managed to do that myself by assuming the 'we' was agreed as was the need for more developers!

Eventually there will be so much software that writing code will need to be automated by machines. GPT-2 is open source and it's able to write computer programs, although not very well. GPT-3 does it better and they give it away for free. So imagine how much more advanced the stuff you have to pay money for is, or the trade secret models. You'd think programmers would move on to a higher-level of abstraction where programmers program the computer programs that do programming. That's probably not going to be the case. For example, take a look at the GPT-2 source code https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py It's only a few hundred lines of code.

> Eventually there will be so much software that writing code will need to be automated by machines.

It's already here, and has been for a long time. We call these machines "compilers".

Women and men used to do computing and mathematics together until man created things like compilers that automated a lot of the tasks women were doing. The man in tech then woke up one day and wondered where all the women went. Now man has done the same thing to himself.

There's always a conflict between leveraging your background and optimizing for what is highest pay currently (unless you're really lucky). Neither direction is a guarantee. Certainly we would like a society where a person who follows the latter policy is always able to succeed at it. It's an important signal for where the need is the highest. At some point (hopefully soon..) society will have way too many real estate agents again, and it's better if they go where they are needed rather than toughing it out because they think there are no alternatives at their age.

> When you reach a certain age you have to play to your strengths and focus on the things you're good at doing.

source please

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