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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The ageism I saw is why I decided I didn't want to be in software development for the long term and left the field.

I personally think the mentality is stupid and probably quite inefficient. In my field, law, they don't even let you into the courtroom until you're 5+ years in. Practicing law is an art and people with 20 years of experience are just better at it than people starting out. I never understood why so many people think software development is any different. Companies don't lay off their lawyers and hire fresh graduates when some new major new law goes into effect, so why do people lay off their software developers and hire fresh graduates when some major new technology becomes popular?

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I wouldn't argue for ageism, but I would say programming is different from law because technology changes much faster than law. There aren't giant paradigm shifts in law every 10 years.

A new technology may in fact be much more productive to work with than an old one. Does someone with COBOL experience have an advantage or a disadvantage in learning Python vs someone who is just starting? Which is larger, the amount of useful knowledge they bring along, or the amount they have to discard?

There are sage old programmers that I look up to. But there are also a lot who just burned out and quit, tired of the new technology treadmill. I'm not sure which I'll become.

The volume of small, incremental, changes in law is higher. Let me put it this way. The Dodd-Frank regulations that have come out so far in the last two years is probably the same number of pages, printed 50 lines per page, as the C++ source for Oracle's Hotspot JVM. And it's only 30% done. And there is no ChangeLog.

The pace of paradigm shifts is indeed much faster in technology, but I disagree there are major paradigm shifts in technology every 10 years. There are major developments within specific scientific domains like AI, image recognition, etc, but in software engineering itself there is little new under the sun. There is nothing in Javascript that wasn't done better in Smalltalk 30 years ago. CoffeeScript, C#, Lua, Ruby, etc? Derivative stuff that any Lisp-er plucked out of 1985 could pick up in a week or two.

I feel like a lot of what you're talking about is applicable to languages and technologies in general. Advantageous technological knowledge seems to be more about frameworks and domain-specific experience more than anything else; something that a Lisp-er from the 1980's will have quite a steep learning curve ahead for.

Not disagreeing with your point. Just pointing out something that has been bothering me a bit about the fragmented platform market.

Your field has a guild and you enjoy the benefits of a professional culture that is centuries in the making. Fully agree with your points regarding the comparative rates of change, and, the sad fact (isn't it?) that the lack of deep exposure to the existing body of work in field due to a lack of effective apprenticeship of the non-existant-guild gives rise to the "major paradigm shift" every 10 years.

Law has much faster changes than programming. In programming you can use 2 year old ideas and be fine, in law no so much. A single case before the supreme court can completely change what's legal. And just about every bill changes something significant for someone.

Ditto doctors, you are required to stay up to date, where programmers can come back after 10 years and learn on the job doctors need to pass a "Maintenance of Certification Exam" or break the law.

PS: Programmers do need to keep learning, but it's no where near as time consuming.

Law I think is a field with unique responsibilities for their members to stay current and keep learning, things do change fast and you have to keep up to stay effective.

Paradigm shifts every 10 years? Not really. COBOL to Python ain't no paradigm shift.

We also have the issue of "digital natives."

In programming, there is a difference in someone who learned computers in college, someone who learned computers in high school, and someone who learned computers in grade school. Then the next wave was kids who grew up with the internet. I suspect it will continue with kids who grew up with touch devices. I don't think there is a similar parallel in other industries.

I'm 37 years of age I've been programming since the age of 7 (1982), and programming for the Internet since 17 (1992); that's 30 years of software development and 20 years of Internet/network programming; mostly web and mostly for government or in commercial environments and in more languages and frameworks that I care to remember.

Today I consider my judgement, that is to say, my ability to forsee the path of a project, or anticipate and avoid complexity to be better than it ever has been in the past, and think this is one of my strongest and most marketable skills.

Yes I still learn new things (faster than ever), and yes I am still very productive.

Am I a "digital native"?

I don't really buy who "kids who grew up with touch devices" might make better programmers than the generation of people who built Windows, NeXTStep, etc, who are in their 50's and 60's right now. Hell, Knuth is 74.

The fundamentals of programming, as an engineering field, haven't really changed since the 1980's.

Cannot emphasis that enough. I would even argue the opposite: people who are now older than 30 did have the possibility to hack much nearer to the hardware of the devices, and could understand how they work. Now, because the tech is both so well packaged and more complex than before, no one tinker with devices really anymore. Sure, there is stuff like Arduino, but this is really reserved to a couple hackers. You don't have a Arduino hacker in every classroom. So maybe the digital natives are more comfortable with SMS and social media, but that doesn't mean they do better software or hardware developers.

"Kids who grew up with touch devices" may not necessarily make better programmers, but there's such factor as being comfortable with tools, I guess.

It's like the language. You spend a lot of time observing and using the system (writing, speaking)—even without full understanding—and you get comfortable: you easily distinguish between characters, recognize speech, can quickly and legibly write. It takes much less effort to apply this knowledge to do successfully things that may require it.

Likewise, if you spend a lot of time around computers, it takes much less effort then to use them for many things, including programming, since computers (or, maybe in future, touch devices) are tools we use for programming.

Would you argue knuth is a good modern software developer? Have you ever used latex? It's an outdated unmaintainable piece of crap.. Did he develop anything we would call good software in the past ten years?

Knuth is not a developer, he is a computer scientist. The standard CS career path is not yet well trodden, maybe we are all supposed to turn into managers and high-level researchers as we get older?

Knuth didn't develop LaTeX.

You have to understand that practicing law is not influenced by VC money as much as it is software development. Since VCs (and all these new incubators) have clear preference toward younger entrepreneurs, it is logical to expect that these kind of preference will be replicated in other segments of the market.

I think that VCs and incubators have very good reason to invest in mainly younger entrepreneurs, and they probably suggest to hire "the best, regardless of age" but ....

It's all about the money. New graduates are cheaper. It's that simple. Technology and business are both over-populated with Randian/Libertarian douchebags for whom the quarterly bottom line is more important than good engineering or business as a sustainable entity in the larger social setting. Everything else is handwaving to hide this fact.

Besides advocating murder in some other comment, a quick scan of your post history reveals you mostly leave incendiary political remarks and don't really add anything useful, in my opinion, to a hacker discussion. In other words, fatbird is a troll account.

__Could someone with administrative access take a look and ban fatbird's account?__

Regarding this post specifically: I'm not sure what kind of sensible forum lets you tar an entire class of people with the label "douchebag."

The kind created by an author so devoted to not being mistaken that he's been legitimately worried about being taken in by arbitrary moral fashions and putting entire ideas off limits.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

tl,dr: You have to consider heresy seriously if you want to think clearly. Restrictions on expressing heretical ideas are harmful, though it's unsafe to disregard them where they exist.

Says the guy with a username of 'tmp458' who has exactly one comment, above. How many accounts did you create to flag my comment?

I'm not a troll account. I haven't been terribly active. I do tend to read more than write. "Take a look and ban"? Why bother taking a look if banning is called for?

Calling people names is against the guidelines and the spirit of HN regardless of past comment history.

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