Comment by kpgraham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kpgraham | Hacker News Reader

I am 64. I wrote my first program in 1970 and have worked as a programmer since 1976. Programming was a good career choice. For many years I was a manager and pretty much hated it and returned to programming. I quit my job and went to work at IBM as a software engineer the year I turned 50. I was the oldest person in my department, and was a bit of a father figure to some of the kids there. Otherwise I did not fit in and left after two years. I worked at about the same salary on a job for the next ten years and now, at 64, I have a nice job helping to translate COBOL to Java. I am still making a six figure salary, but I will retire in 313 days (I wrote an app that gives me exact time down to the second). I had no problem finding a job when I was 62, but the job was one where I needed Java skills, plus in-depth knowledge of legacy programming languages. I taught myself Fortran, then Cobol, then PL/1, then Focus, then Basic, then VB, then Java, then Javascript, then Ruby. I find it easy to upgrade my skills. I code in PHP for fun in my off time, so when I retire, I will still program my little PHP projects for fun. Programming is not what I do, but who I am.

This is something I just had to to — http://teespring.com/programming-is-who-i-am

Good one, would have backed it if it had a round neck tshirt.

Edit — Yes, I made a slight mistake in the URL.

Here you go — http://teespring.com/programming-is-what-i-do

Would you tell me a little about your transition to and from management? Did you find it difficult to give up the management role at all, and were there things that you learned from managing that you were able to use when you went back to being a full-time engineer?

In the early 1980s I was hired as the Manager of Micro-Development at Lockheed Martin because I wanted too much money to work as a programmer. In these days the section I was in had no PCs so I brought my old luggable (not really portable) IBM PC/XT from home. I worked as a programmer for the large part and I was happy doing development work with two or three other programmers, but when PCs became ubiquitous I had a whole department and I spent much of time managing personnel issues and not coding. I switched the coding from COBOL to VB4 and Oracle and then Java, and produced hundreds of thousands of lines of code for a Document Management System that I wrote from scratch. At one point, when the Director was promoted to another department and the VP was fired, I was acting VP of the entire development group. Luckily this only lasted a month before they hired a new VP. All of the systems that I wrote (including the original EZPass system for reviewing toll violations) reached maturity and my job was managing small improvements and bug fixes and nothing new or original. It was programming hell. By the time I left, a new department had been formed to set up some the Web apps that would eventually replace the systems that I wrote, but I was left to maintain the old system. Basically I worked myself out of job. I was doing precious little coding managing people that were bored and unhappy. Younger and more ambitious people were getting the next big thing. In 2000-2001 people were hiring anyone that could spell programmer for big bucks. After 10 years I was glad to move to IBM where I hoped I would be appreciated. I have been a programmer acting as a team lead since then, but I never again want to be in the position where people call me in the morning to give me lame excuses as to why they can't come to work that day.

Maybe you didn't fit in because you referred to your colleagues as kids? Our Data Scientist must be pushing 70 and he fits in just fine with our young startup crowd. He is probably the most liked guy at the company and has more extracurricular activities going on than the rest of us.

Thanks for writing, I like this:

"Programming is not what I do, but who I am."

I think it is quote from Gibson.

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