I’m nearly 60. Here’s what I’ve learned about growing old so far | Hacker News Reader

I’m nearly 60. Here’s what I’ve learned about growing old so far

theguardian.com

74 pointsstichers43 comments

I am 60 years old and as a person always learning I have accumulated a huge stack of knowledge and I think my mind is in a very good shape so I still can learn new things quickly. Long time ago I found a good balance between life and work, and a good paid job by european standards. The only problem is that sometimes I envy the 200K $ paid jobs, but there are two main walls to pursue that salary: First: I have no work experience in the IT sector. Second: I have never used AWS and other cloud services.I am risk adverse and receiving a huge bill for cloud services while learning AWS is something that I have avoided.

I can solve leetcode and hackerrank problems more or less easily, have a CS and math degree, a Ph.D. in Math, can program in a long list of computer languages, know a lot of stats, machine learning, algorithm, complexity, etc.

But at 60, if you have learned to focus in what is important, you will be able to provide an answer to many unknowns and that is a precious skill. So to summarize, at 60 I am in my best moment but you always want more (now is more money).

Have you looked at the free tiers offered by AWS or Azure? It's a great way to learn without spending anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26708148

The service is only free until you reach their limit. The post has 166 comments.

Best way to prevent that is to set an account billing alert that will SMS you if your bill goes over $X dollars.

I doubt this feature will ever be implemented, as trying to provide some kind of real-time spend is extremely hard, especially when there are 100+ service bills that need to be aggregated, which usually is a batch process where these things get resolved.

This sounds a lot like "an old guy's excuse".

If you are 60 years old, you learned how to monitor your spending in the late 1960s.

Same skill here.

When they were eight?

I can't believe you have a PhD in math, can do leetcode easily, but AWS is too much for you.

I will personally show you around AWS if you're up for it. Although, I only know EC2, but arguably that's the only thing that matters :D

I worked at AWS and have architected large scale systems, and AWS is too much for me. The problem is that many of their solutions are super focused and they have ecosystem lock-in (i.e. lambda) which allow it all to come together (at a price).

What is a better route for someone wanting to run a personal project but also learn the tooling that would be needed if the project "took off" in the sense of using a lot of bandwidth or having a lot of users/data? If that question is too broad... Is lightsail a good starting place within AWS? Or is there another service that would allow for less lock in but similar features?

Scale really does require some degree of dimensional analysis. You can go very far with just Amazon S3 and an EC2 host. The place to begin is really with the fundamentals of a single host, and then looking for where bottlenecks will happen per project. That's when you can go through the catalog and find something which may be an ok upgrade to then buy into the lock-in.

Why would they need to learn AWS? Their other skills, knowledge and experience is too valuable to do AWS plumbing work. Work can be delegated in areas that one is not skilled in if they bring other valuable skills to the table.

Unless the desired goal is to be an AWS engineer but that’s a different story.

I don't know why they would need to learn AWS, ask them. They mentioned it, not me. I just offered to help.

I'm more curious and interested to find out about this guy on the internet who wants to personally offer and guide a random stranger around AWS. Tell me more about yourself, good sir.

I don't think it's too much for him. He just finds it distasteful. I have such feeling for some technologies, like Oracle. It's not that they are super hard. I just don't want to touch it with 10ft pole.

If you live in USA, i'm pretty sure you can pull 200k easy even if all you know if leetcoding well.

This concept that old-people skills are obsolete is a completely modern phenomena, and I'm dubious that it's even true.

The pace of change is fast, but only because we are still dealing with the consequences of the scientific and industrial revolutions. I now think of all technologies past ~1800 as "modern". Basically you should learn all of it to some degree.

19th century machinist skills? Still useful and valid. The basic design of a lathe has not changed since the late 1700s.

COBOL from the 1970s? Nobody is going to throw away so much working code. The first generation of programmers is dying off only now, trust me this stuff is going to be around for a long time. Same deal with C / C++.

Oil burner heating from the 1940s? It's a convenient upgrade from the prior coal technology (much easier to pour oil than bunker coal). Most of the systems installed are still there and running. Diesel fuel / jet fuel / heating oil is still probably the most convenient to use energy source.

A slight change to how web technologies work? Really not a big deal..

AWS? Their servers are still basically IBM PCs.

> Nobody is going to throw away so much working code

But, inexplicably, they're also not going to pay (much) for anybody to maintain it.

I'm not sure if this is true or not, but my sense in my own lifetime and in talking to those who went before me that people are increasingly seen in terms of existing certified skills rather than actual skills or abilities. It's as if people are widgets and you need a certified widget to fit in a certain spot in the machine; it's not enough if the widget actually fits but isn't certified as such, and it doesn't matter if it's a free widget producing machine that will produce whatever widgets you want for free from the air around us; it also doesn't matter if these two things are patently true to anyone who will think about it for a second.

Maybe I'm just in a bad spot in my life at the moment but I do think many problems in current society are due to some weird phenomenon where people are seen as unchanging objects, and where abilities can't be inferred even when obvious.

You say "people are increasingly seen in terms of existing certified skills" - now I wonder if that's really true that its more nowadays, and if it is, why... In the 90s employers demanded Microsoft or networking certs. This kinda thing's been going on long time. Some of us unix geeks sidestepped that nasty treadmill, as unix jobs didn't generally require formal quals (albeit some folks commanded a premium with Sun or HP certs). Nowadays you can no longer escape using *nix, for with cloud computing, you're tied to MS/Google/AWS. This may account for the perception (or indeed reality) that certs are required more these days. But as a dev (rather than ops) person you can still dodge it. Personally I think AWS certs are a PITA - lots of effort spent for a piece of paper with a limited shelf life which doesn't necessarily prepare you for the actual tech skills needed in your immediate job. IMHO, as always in the tech industry, one has to spot the fads and treadmills and stand well clear ;)

>>"After 50 one begins to recognise in oneself a growing resistance to change, if only because it so often nullifies years of hard-won training"

This really struck home to me. It's true: we teach ourselves life hacks and gradually they become redundant as different life skills are needed.

But also I'd like to think we get better at distinguishing between good changes and bad changes. We should resist the bad changes, or at least explain ad nauseam to the kids that their proposed change a) has been tried before and was crap, or b) is the beginning of the end, or c) is against the natural order of things. ;)

Over time I've gotten better at letting others fail. I failed a lot during my career, especially when I was young, and it seems to have worked out for me.

Yes, you are perfectly right, but sometimes it is overwhelming/tiring, the bad changes are becoming so common (and supported/accepted by so many people) that "fighting" against them appears to be (and very probably it actually is anyway) completely void of any relevance.

Wow, I’m 58 and I could write almost the exact opposite for each paragraph (ok pop music from 1999-2004 I agree with).

No “oof” getting up. Knobs are unremarkable. Continuing to work on things that yes, are intended to change the world.

One thing not mentioned: I see someone on the street and they are the spitting image of someone I know well…as they looked 30 years ago.

I'm in your ballpark age-wise.

Physically I'm definitely not as capable as I used to be. Doing construction work like I did when I was 20ish would be very rough. I'm still holding up in terms of slower activity like wilderness backpacking, but strength isn't there, and there are aches and pains.

Mentally I'm probably the best I've been in my adult life, but there was a decade or so when that wasn't true. I started slipping, from laziness really, and it took conscious effort on my part to reverse that. My personal theory, founded on nothing but my own observations and biases, is that a lot of middle-age mental decline comes from losing the desire to make the effort. Older age will likely be different, but that's how it feels now.

Re your last point, I recently saw someone who was the spitting image of me 35 years ago. It was surprisingly unsettling.

I had the "oof" but I got rid of it by lifting weights, starting at age 51. I don't lift much anymore, because I kept hurting myself doing powerlifting. But it got rid of the "oof."

I'm sure there's a happy medium lifting enough to keep healthy but not so much that it causes injury. I've never been good at doing medium.

> Certain common stereotypes of older people – as creatures bewildered by technology and outfoxed by ordinary packaging – have at their root this resistance to pointless change. I have decades of experience in getting the lids off things, all of it rendered useless by these new lids they have now.

Packaging gets more infernal every year, and I don't understand why. Fine, put the safety seal on the Tylenol, but I'm routinely forced to commit violence with a box cutter to win prizes that aren't ingestible at all.

For a while, I was taking an anti-coagulant whose packaging could only be opened with a very sharp blade. <sigh>

I suppose a small explosive charge might have worked too but never tried it...

Sounds more like 80 than 60. I am 59, my wife cares for the elderly that are often 95+. Muscle loss is real. Keep up your physical activity and get your ass out of the chair often!

Stay in shape people. Fitness pays dividends for decades after the age of 35.

Look at the graphics depicting "60 year olds" on the top of the article.

Then realise that Tom Cruise in Maverick is 60 years old.

Ask yourself the question, does Tom Cruise look like the guy on that chair?

I still think of albums released in 2006 as "recent" :-D

This is what you think when you don’t exercise and aren’t in tune with yourself. You had all this time to do it (get in tune with yourself) and if you still didn’t manage it by 60 (!) it will establish itself and occupy you with these memories etc. that this man has listed.

Now listen to someone who lead a different life and you will not get this dread in their answer.

If anything this is another reminder how not to live life.

Forgetting “all the popular music released between 1999 and 2004” is a GOOD thing!

Except I hate TV and radio and cannot think straight when that NOISE is running yammering and ego tripping away…

The grunts are real, however… but I’m only 47 so what do I know

I mean, despite chair time, and I do also have a keyboard rack for my hammock, and a neck rest… I’m do ride 60km on my bike at least once a week and run and bike some daily, in addition to stretching and yoga and stuff… I recently discovered acupuncture and it’s joys.

I still grunt, and not just standing up, but contemplating the bewildering array of different things I must do simply by being newly aware of their significance in a given task at hand that I previously was content or able to deal with in a less profoundly holistic manner…

Interesting .. I'm over 60 but under 70. Much of that article was relevant to me. However, talking of attitudes, the one that really surprised me was the increased reluctance of dog-rescue charities to let older people adopt rescue mutts. Not paranoia!

https://i.ibb.co/yFVFSdS/IMG-20220608-153041.jpg

Well, now that's a stretch :D

Many of these sound subjective, like always having the radio on.

> Your reflexes may have dulled a bit, but your tolerance for endless repetition will be immense.

I think that comes from having kids! I'm currently in that boat

Yes the grunts are a PITA and you never catch yourself in time, they sneak out as if possessing wills of their own.

When it happens to me I usually joke "I mean, not-(grunt)" when I'm around my wife. Not so much with others, they might not get it.

Yes the radio is always on and will remain so. I can’t be bothered by streaming services.

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