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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

In my 20s I worried about losing my intellectual abilities in my 40s and 50s

What you really just lose is patience for BS :)

Sure, yeah, you lose 10% of your raw intellect if you stay healthy[1]. You probably more than make up for it in experience and wisdom. But hell the thing that demotivates me is the recycled insanity of large organizations, egotistical tech executives, hype cycles, and all the other BS. Eventually you can learn to laugh it off, but you don't take it as seriously as you did when you're younger. It motivates you less. You stay focused on what interests you outside of whatever external factors happen.

For some, of course though, this just leads to burnout on the whole field. Seeing one dumb hype cycle after another, with self-described visionaries chasing trends, rather than defining them, heartlessly laying off staff, etc, even when profitable. Its enough to drive you crazy if you let it.

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/

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You lose 10% of your ability to react and think quickly, not your ability to think. In fact, the older you get the more deep your thinking becomes. This is probably what you see when you think “John is slow to respond at times” (John being the older, 40+ developer). The reality is John remembers the last time someone suggested using MongoDB as a caching store and how well that worked out. John is recalling all those crunchtime meetings in the war room because someone wrote bad code or the software architecturally failed. The slowness to respond is them weighing all the options, for which they have more in the catalog than you. A binary search on 100,000 objects is fast (22 year old), a binary search on 1,000,000,000 is slow (a 40+ year old). Ageism is just fancy employment discrimination. I’m 40 and I continue to experience ageism and discrimination but I endure because I love what I do, others will find value in that, and the money is better than working at 84Lumber.

You reminded me of that "I'm fast at math" joke :)

The joke, for those who don't know:

Interviewer: What would you say is your most impressive skill?

Candidate: I am ridiculously fast at math.

Impressed, the interviewer wants to test this: "Ok then, quick, what's 347+578?"

Candidate (confidently): "5!"

Interviewer: "w ... what? That's not correct! That wasn't even close!"

Candidate: "Yes, but it was ridiculously fast!"

I've come across good and bad devs at all ages but the best have always been older than me.

Yinzer!

I'm 42 and so much better than I was at 22, but nowhere near where I was as an individual at 33. I blame the latter on having three small children. It has taken me a long time to deal with being only above average instead of someone people viewed as a genius.

Not sure if I agree with the intellect loss - I've not lost anything, I'm just much better at juggling multiple things and less good at the math-heavy detail work. However I'm still able pick up new skills as fast as ever.

A friend of mine is in his mid-50s and has kept working on those things, he's as sharp as ever.

I think I've held on to my intellect (mid-40s), just have gotten wiser. And my tolerance for the inane, useless, and just plain stupid has dropped dramatically. I blame/credit that on having small kids too.

Less tolerance? What do you mean?

I’ve found my outward tolerance has had to increase. I still have an internal drive to shape outcomes in more meaningful directions. This has driven (or perhaps co-evolved with) the development of a wide range of skills to be persuasive and nudge people.

People can be so incredibly narrow-minded, short-sighted, inspiring, and/or wise, sometimes in the span of two sentences. Dealing with this juxtaposition is jarring and requires large levels of empathy.

It helps me to remember that many people vastly overestimate their individual influence and conscious awareness of what’s happening with their bodies and minds. I regularly aspire to balance what someone wants in the short run, long run with what larger groups need and expect. Kids teach you this very directly.

This touches upon something I've noticed lately, people skills are at least as important as technology and raw intelligence.

I'm 46 and have been writing code pretty much every day since 8yo.

I used to think code was the greatest thing, and would gladly write it for free. But I was also very arrogant, too impatient to negotiate, and didn't really give a damn about the team as a whole.

These days I find writing code pretty boring, I've already solved most kinds of problems in several different ways.

But putting all the pieces together, finding optimal strategies, negotiating with stake holders and making sure the team works well as a whole; I find those very fulfilling and exciting.

> people skills are at least as important as technology and raw intelligence.

They absolutely are, especially in a team environment. In terms of the quality and velocity of the team's output, the competent dev who works well with the rest of the team is nearly always better than the genius dev who doesn't.

> [...]negotiating with stake holders and making sure the team works well as a whole; I find those very fulfilling and exciting.

That seems to assume that, with age, you also gain power. As for myself, I'm hitting 40 now, and have absolutely no power over others whatsoever, and that's a pretty tough spot to be in, because now I'm bored with the tech stuff but nobody has ever offered me any other kind of work, and I don't expect anyone ever will, and I also expect it will be more and more of a struggle to keep convincing others to even let me keep doing that.

> I'm bored with the tech stuff but nobody has ever offered me any other kind of work.

I recommend doing the work that you want (alongside your regular responsibilities) and if you're good at it the offers will follow. If you're not, you'll develop experience.

Nah, I've started asking for that kind of work in the hiring process but it's mostly doing what I can where I am.

And it's not about power really, nor control; it's about not needing them; nudging things in the right direction almost without people noticing; to me, that's what people skills is all about.

But of course the level of experience helps, because with that comes some respect.

> As for myself, I'm hitting 40 now, and have absolutely no power over others whatsoever, and that's a pretty tough spot to be in, because now I'm bored with the tech stuff but nobody has ever offered me any other kind of work, and I don't expect anyone ever will, and I also expect it will be more and more of a struggle to keep convincing others to even let me keep doing that.

Sounds rough. We're not in your situation and probably don't understand the situation very well. If you want to continue the conversation, let us know. I'm not going to offer any kind of rah-rah optimism... Low expectations might be a good way to go.

A few questions: have you asked for other kinds of work? How have you asked?

Have you asked yourself this question: Are you selling or are you buying? (What I mean is this: in terms of linguistics and positioning, are you offering something of value or are you asking others to give you value?)

Ideally, you would present your "ask" in a way where both sides benefit. (Apologies if all this is obvious or uninteresting... I'm just starting the conversation.)

What else do we need to know so that we can offer thoughts that might be useful?

> As for myself, I'm hitting 40 now

I like to think of a numerical age as a relatively high-variance (statistically) way of summarizing a lot of attributes: experience, wisdom, flexibility, free time, passion, pain tolerance, risk tolerance, technical skills, social skills, social preferences, self-confidence, over-confidence, family priorities, geographic mobility, neuroplasticity, and lots more.

I suggest taking an inventory by reflecting.

This helps in many ways:

* People are able to compensate for lots of weaknesses by using other strengths.

* Some roles, companies, industries will naturally align better than others.

* Reflection can lead to a certain level of acceptance. Own it; be confident in who you are. If there are parts you don't quite understand, be confident that you have started to increase your awareness and process of discovery. This process for many people becomes a very meaningful way to deal with uncertainty.

* Don't let others' assumptions (which are frankly, often relatively unexamined) creep into your brain unexamined.

> because now I'm bored with the tech stuff but nobody has ever offered me any other kind of work

People don't offer you opportunities because you're bored with what you have.

You offer them a different capability they need.

> nobody has ever offered me any other kind of work

Don't wait for someone to come to you. Go out and look for the sort of work you want.

I suspect catching on some sleep, having free time to let your mind relax, and also time to sharpen your skills will bring you up pretty quickly. Improved self awareness may not bring you the confidence you had when you were 33, and improved humility may also prevent the 'genius' perception, but you're probably already more effective an engineer now than 9 years ago. And even more so after you GET SOME SLEEP :-)

Me too. Even without that I'm way more effective than then because now that I'm handicapped I had to focus less on me and more on the entire value chain.

Ruthless focus on having the maximum value for minimum effort.

> the confidence you had when you were 33, and improved humility may also prevent the 'genius' perception, but you're probably already more effective an engineer now than 9 years ago.

I can’t speak empirically to how people’s self awareness changes over time, but this quote rings true for me. I have more humility and a different kind of confidence.

In particular, I am less confident about a lot of things, but even more aware when other people are overconfident. In other words, I know I don’t grasp the complete reality, but I’m damn sure you don’t either. :)

> genius

Something I invented early in my career seemed like a hotshot thing at the time. But I now realize it wasn't that great, and today I could do much better in my sleep.

One of the benefits of experience seems to be greater understanding of some things, even if that means realizing we're not as smart as we used to think we are.

"Greater understanding" is also one theory for the lower tolerance for BS that some have mentioned here. Early in our career/life, we have less basis to recognize nonsense and to understand its impact. With experience, we start to realize, say, a single thing that's happening has orders of magnitude more adverse impact than we can make up with all a team's clever activity, and that there's no good reason for it.

If, when you say "we urgently need to stop dumping toxic waste onto our lawn, because it's an existential threat to our company and everyone around it", but a very junior person hears only "get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!", well, they'll understand someday. If they survive the Superfund site.

Nothing is impressive after you are 30. No one is impressed by anything other than maybe having a 100 million+ startup. When you are in your 20s, you are impressive and "have so much potential". After 30 you are just some guy who hopefully isn't old and incompetent as far as perceptions go. Same applies outside of programming as well, though I guess when you are in the top 5% or so, people are still somewhat impressed, but the bar is completely different.

39 here. I'm significantly better than in my 20s. Much more knowledge and wisdom, a bit less raw brainpower.

But I know I can force myself through hard stuff (prolog, category theory, ML research papers) but only if I can kick out instant gratification for a while (reddit, hn, videogames).

I remember this week more than 10 years ago where my graphics card died, and had to go with this ancient card with zero acceleration, and no videogames. I was surprisingly productive that week.

Constantly needing to “feel productive” after work by limiting hobbies is also enough to drive you crazy after awhile, unless it’s of real personal interest of course and not just to advance your career.

37 here. I’m probably slower than in my 20s but somehow I feel smarter. I feel it takes me less time to learn new stuff and solve complex issues.

Agree. I've learned an approach to picking up new things, solving problems, and thinking things through such that I get it right the first time more often. It's a measure twice cut once type approach. Where as, my younger self would just start trying things and would end up getting it right eventually. It felt fast but took longer and might have had some collateral damage depending on situation.

In what way are you slower then?

I'm 43 and probably slower in the sense that I'm slower at producing code.

I'm slower because I think more about the code I produce. I have a wider knowledge of the domain I work in, cross cutting concerns, and technical choices that I'm taking into account when producing code. So I arrive at a more-correct solution faster.

I would say the tradeoff is worth it, but of course I would because I'm not in my 20s. If faster while missing more security issues, performance problems, and corner cases is what you want, my 20 year old self is probably better.

Reflexes, movements, manual tasks, repetitive tasks

Because a big aspect of intelligence is compression and decompression. As people age they have more context already available so there is more to draw on (automatically) when solving problems or learning. So less distance to get there.

You probably aren't any slower. One difference that I think I've noticed between older and younger devs is that older ones tend to be slower to actually write code than younger ones are. But the code they write tends to be closer to correct, so less time is needed refining and debugging it.

So it can look slower up front, but over the span of the entire task, it's faster.

How much of this "less raw brainpower" is due to age, and how much is due to potentially having a less focused mind? I have massively noticed issues with my concentration, and I don't think it's due to age, so much as to watching Youtube and reddit.

I guess what I'm getting at is it's sometimes hard to untangle what changes are due to getting older, and which ones are due to the world changing. For me it's boredom, I used to have long boring summers, and get bored on weekends in the 90's and early 2000's. I haven't been bored in years. Is this because of the internet? But I'm not bored when I don't have access to the internet now, so maybe I just enjoy some peace and quiet now I'm older.

As far as maintaining focus goes, I had a lot of trouble doing so after 40.

I wrote a small program[1] to help me maintain context between different projects, and I'm now more productive than I was in my 30s.

[1] I tried all the personal task management and task tracker tools, even wrote a few of my own. It turned out that my brain works differently to how the tools want you to work. My new tool which works well to keep me on track matches how I work.

IOW, now I don't have to adjust my brain to the tool, the tool is already adjusted to my brain's process.

Can you give some details on your tool? I've played the "productivity app whack-a-mole" game, too, and always walk away empty. I just stick with a pen and paper, but I'd love a digital solution.

it sounds like it's gotta be catered to your workflow. i wonder what this is like, i work out of sketch books and paper+pen a lot. project context seems like a good thing to be able to preserve and replicate between the various frames. elon mentioned that context switching was one of the more costly plays

> project context seems like a good thing to be able to preserve and replicate between the various frames.

Believe it or not, I actually named the executable 'frame'. However I'm unwilling to share it[1] until I have a good 5m explanation (it's all shell-based).

[1] Well, announce it, anyway. It opensource anyway.

I like to think we ride the same mental wave at times

In case you are still reading, I did a Show HN (my first one!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35945609

> Can you give some details on your tool?

I'm conflicted; on the one hand I would like to let the world know about it, but on the other I can see how it would be easily dismissed as useless when there's literally no docs about it.

I think I shall make a small example usage (terminal only) to demonstrate how it helps me, then post a show HN tomorrow or Saturday (depending).

I'll reply to your post again once I post the show HN.

Fwiw I'm also interested in seeing it.

In case you are still reading, I did a Show HN (my first one!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35945609

Funny timing, I was just discussing with a friend that I can palpably feel a slight loss of edge, I know sometimes that I'm working through something with a little less raw horsepower, and I still wouldn't trade away the experience advantage for anything.

It feels like a shift slightly away from "build the thing right" and toward "build the right thing". There's no sense racing to a destination that we don't want to arrive at in the first place.

The problem is, so much of is BS that it's physically painful to keep up. Look, someone reinvented a basic lisp-ism in their mediocre language! Yes, new buzzwords for each part that was a function parameter to the original system! Yay! Now you can reduce your boilerplate by 10%!

The system is still an unmaintainable ball of mud, but at least your for() loops can now have ridiculously high jitter and concurrency landmines thanks to multicore use on a system bottlenecked by disk IOPs.

Part of you wants to play the curmudgeon and say "I like my old simple ways" instead of yelling "you idiots are spinning wheels on useless APIs instead of learning to do any actual engineering analysis on maintainability or performance." It's tough to balance!

> Part of you wants to play the curmudgeon

Where I currently work, I'm being mentored (even at my age and experience!) by a developer who is in his early 70s. He really is a curmudgeon, but what he actually does is perform. His code is some of the best I've ever seen, and consistently outperforms that of the younger crowd. Then he just points out when he's using an "obsolete" technique to run circles around them.

I think a lot of reasons older people encounter resistance is they don't want to play along with the BS.

Lots of 20-somethings would have no trouble working with a graybeard in his 50s if he was patient, played along, and acted as a mentor. But they don't want to work with him if he's rude and dismissive, and there's more of them than him.

What ever is the age, nobody wants to work with a rude and dismissive person.

Yep. Too many people think their age and experience gives them an excuse to be rude.

You can be "correct" but still a jerk. If the people who you're rude to can influence decisions, they won't go well for you.

As a resident graybeard in my 50's, I have to say I really dislike working with rude and dismissive kids.

> But they don't want to work with him if he's rude and dismissive

Nobody wants to work with a jerk, regardless of their age.

When faced with a ball of mud or spaghetti I recommend putting all what can be factored out in a micro-service and connect them via RPC to REST endpoints. Make your services are stateless so you can scale effortless and put an API gateway in the center so you can manage. As the service business logic isn‘t really stateless put your state in a caching server. Actually you can‘t trust a cache so also put in an opaque field into your client interface. Any problems you encounter can be solved however considering the number of services to be build a fully dynamic CI/CD pipeline is a good investment for potential developer demand first.

I genuinely don't know if you're being sarcastic

My biggest "problem" was when I had kids. I used to spend a lot of my free hours not directly working, but thinking of work problems. So I'd be playing a video game, at a party, or whatever, but in the back of my head I was also thinking of work.

After kids those unpaid thought cycles are spent on how I can help my kids grow into better adults.

It actually forced me to change my work habits a bit. Before I could be less methodical about working through a problem because I had lots of spare brain cycles outside of work. But now I have to work through problems more diligently.

I have a similar experience except with a different outcome. All that thinking about how to be a better human somehow, strangely, is translateable to better (software) product development. I spend more time understanding people and their desires and less time chasing shiny technology.

Have you ever EVER heard a 40 year old say 'I was a lot smarter back in my 20s'??? never... more likely they'll reminisce about the stupid things they got up to.

Your certainly not losing your intellectual abilities at 40 or 50, far from it.

40 and 50 year olds will just be moving on to the next stage of their career, using their collected experience to manage and pass on knowledge. Coding requires focus which is difficult to come by generally when you're older and juggling many responsibilities that you've created in your life up to this point like family, finances etc. You certainly don't become dumb.

All the attributes of big tech organisations you described could be applied to many other fields. When you're at the bottom (like a smart 20 year old) and have no control, it can be frustrating. You can rebel against it, play the game, or go out and do your own thing.

This is what is me as I head into my 50’s. I always knew it was BS, but now I can’t ignore it any more. Corporate culture garbage drives me absolutely to depression now, and I can’t force myself to care any more. I love teaching and mentoring and leading and programming and all those skills. But I can’t muster up to energy to give a crap about anything other than the work itself, the team, the product, etc. I more clearly see the processes that are set up simply to look busy, and I can’t force myself to participate. It’s telling me at some core level it’s time to strike out on my own. But, once you’ve seen the fnords, you can’t unsee them.

Hello fellow Discordian! Ewige Blumenkraft und ewige Schlangenkraft!

I've also seen the fnords. Makes it difficult to drag my ass to work sometimes.

I quit my job at a Silicon Valley BigCorp two years ago, almost to the day, for these very reasons. Luckily, we are in a position where I could just do what I wanted during this time, mainly go rockclimbing and help my wife in our worryingly enormous garden. But I miss certain things, like being in the room (whether physically or virtually) with a bunch of smart people and solving problems. And of course I miss the money. But I'm just not sure I can take the BS anymore.

I’m working on building my own quant/stat arb/HFT trading fund with a few folks from my career as partners, self financed. I think that’s the out. I love what I do but investors, customers, hierarchy, and the band wagon that follows I think is the genesis of a lot of the BS.

It's a tradeoff. Most 20 somethings think they are better than they really are because they lack experience. Having decades of experience makes you better.

I'm 48, I'm definitely very much improved as a programmer and engineer relative to when I was 28. You think you know everything when you are 28. When you are 48, you realize you had a lot to learn back then. Anyway, I'll be doing this for at least another 30 or so years. As long as my brain works, I'll be using it.

The reason old people become slower is not necessarily that they are old but because they retire and stop using their brains. Not using your brain is bad for your brain. Age related deterioration is of course inevitable. But you can slow things down a lot by just keep on using it and staying active.

    "Workin' 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin'
    Barely gettin' by, it's all takin' and no givin'
    They just use your mind and they never give you credit
    It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it

    9 to 5, for service and devotion
    You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion
    Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
    I swear sometimes that man is out to get me
    Mmmmm..."

> What you really just lose is patience for BS :)

So. Much. This.

I'm an "older developer" as well and the one and only thing that gets in my way of learning new things is the amount of useless information in the documentation and code.

I think, generally speaking, you get less "hungry" as you get older across the board.

Sure, you could become excellent at guitar in your 40s, but unless you're extremely motivated, you probably don't care about learning it as much as a teenager would. Same goes with learning or becoming anything else.

(Of course, everything here is on average.)

I disagree, the avg age of someone starting a company is 42[1] :)

I honestly think its truly just about filtering BS. I get hungry about the right things. Just like I get passionate about the right relationships. But not goin to drop everything for someone that shows the tiniest bit of interest me like maybe when I was young and had no idea what kind of relationship I wanted.

1 - https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/this-is-the-avera....

By hunger I mean the raw chutzpah and energy to do something bold, or commit to going in a brand new direction. Not necessarily the capability to do so.

Older people typically have more money and connections. If anyone could start a company I guarantee you more young people would start companies.

And not to mention experience. You may want to start a company when you're younger, but it's harder when you don't know what you're doing.

> By hunger I mean the raw chutzpah and energy to do something bold, or commit to going in a brand new direction

I haven't actually noticed a decline in that with age. But what I have noticed is that the more experienced a person is, the sooner they're likely to spot when a new direction is probably a dead end and avoid going that way in the first place. Less experienced people tend to have to actually walk in that direction for a while before realizing it's going nowhere.

> you lose 10% of your raw intellect if you stay healthy

this is not true, and not substantiated. maybe you meant “if you don’t stay healthy,” but it’s still not an accurate number, or even a thing which is specific enough that attaching a number to it could mean anything.

there is some improvement in cognitive function from exercise, but that applies to all age ranges.

My understanding of the research is summed up in this paper[1]. Which states:

> The most important changes in cognition with normal aging are declines in performance on cognitive tasks that require one to quickly process or transform information to make a decision, including measures of speed of processing, working memory, and executive cognitive function. Cumulative knowledge and experiential skills are well maintained into advanced age.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/

As a casual reader of the thread, with little or no related knowledge:

The years add depth and complexity to our filters for processing new knowledge. Is the delay measurable? Probably. Is that 'decline'? Maybe it looks like it by the simplest standards.

Is there a meaningful analogy in neuroscience where simpler and more robust 'structures' - superficially appearing as a degeneration - could be a reflection of efficiency and optimization?

I can tackle complexities in my 40s that I couldn't dream of in my 20s. (Maybe I'm a late bloomer.) If my 40s -> 60s is anything like my 20s -> 40s, mentally, I'm just a little bit excited to be honest.

Total outsider thinking out loud. The suggestion that our 20's is any sort of peak (besides maybe animal / physical) gives me a laugh. I was a simpleton in my 20s.

From the neuroscience side not that I'm aware of. Getting old is basically the process of your body not being able to repair itself anyway.

I think the apparent conflict resolves if you consider that you have learned to be a better problem solver, a better learner, such that a small decrease in some 'raw ability' is completely overshadowed by gains from learning.

For a concrete example I'm much better at close reading now. Even if younger me was 10x as intelligent there are problems he'd bounce off that I wouldn't simple because I now know how to slow down and read thoughtfully.

Yes this exactly. Once you've been through a few cycles of madness it is fun to chat with others who have as well (plus helps you keep your sanity and perspective).

> What you really just lose is patience for BS :)

41 here and I agree with most of the comments from the elder. One thing though I think we older people have to acknowledge is that we might have changed the BS bar. It feels a bit to me like saying that there is no music like the one from 20 years ago.

I am trying to be positive and that is something I say to myself :)

I'm 5 years old and I think Tchaikovsky is better than music today

> What you really just lose is patience for BS :)

I bailed from coding after full-day Java debugging session that made no progress. Way too stressful at+after some age.

So the BS was technical, not peoplal.

I'm moving into old dev land. I'd summarize my transition as moving from "need to impress" to "need to be impressed".

> What you really just lose is patience for BS :)

Well, I lost this way earlier than that already hahaha. Totally agree with your comment by the way.

So what is motivating to you in your career?

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