6 ms·

as someone who is becoming an elder, I can't help but feel a touch of Schadenfreude when I see youngsters run face-first into stuff that I've predicted will hap

as someone who is becoming an elder, I can't help but feel a touch of Schadenfreude when I see youngsters run face-first into stuff that I've predicted will happen, secure in their knowledge that I'm a dinosaur and can't possibly know what I'm talking about any more. It's like a spectator sport.

jason-phillips 4y ago
Your role is not to prevent that from happening. Your role is to do your job and set an example, which the younglings will remember years down the road. Those are two different things.
tokamak-teapot 4y ago
It is, but I’ve watched companies who were doing well start hiring younger, cheaper -10x developers and people losing their incomes, pensions etc. because they listened to the ’cheap’ and trendy-seeming who were eager to people-please and ignorant of their ignorance. The reverse is true, of course. ‘Expert beginners’ and those just looking to avoid any hard work or responsibility until they retire are equally as dangerous. If you’re a non-technical business owner, manager or anyone else who relies on tech and the people who build and run it, it is completely impossible to choose wisely, as you simply don’t know who to believe. I’ve got myself to positions of high trust in companies and then found my advice ignored both when I warn against: 1. Hiring those I can see are not just bad value but going to destroy tech and teams through arrogance and being given more responsibility than they should have (yet). 2. Leaving the dangerously incompetent ‘seniors’ and workshy in positions where they are either preventing any kind of growth or, worse, accelerating a death spiral which ends in either zero ability to compete or a tech disaster of some kind (lost or corrupted data, breach, etc.) If you’re trusted, that doesn’t mean that your advice to spend some time building smaller teams of actually competent people - or whatever your proposal is, will be heeded. The smell of money over a short term (or lack of it) are usually going to win.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  I like the phrase "-10x developers"... whose work has a net negative value 10 times the value added by an average developer (haven't heard it before, but surely such people exist!)
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    what's wild is that several YC companies that have frequently-featured job posts on HN explicitly state they want 10x engineers. Kable is one: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kable/jobs/h3wKq6F-founding-backend-software-engineer https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kable/jobs/h3wKq6F-fou... > You are a 10x engineer, capable of getting more done than others and in a fraction of the time.
    - biztos 4y ago
      You are a mind capable of bridging space and time, but have only three years of experience, and don’t have a job at FAANG already, and will value 0.5% of common stock as fifty percent of your total compensation. Because your code is bulletproof and so is our coffee!
stillkicking 4y ago
It's only a spectator sport if you're not downstream from those changes though. I also think ageism is only part of the problem, it's stubbornness in general. Even if you're younger, it's difficult to translate hard-earned experience into respect because many engineers are infatuated with their own designs and algorithms. I've had people reject my advice even though I literally worked 2 years on app dedicated to solving that specific problem we were having. Of course they had egg on their face at the first demo. And they're still using that broken code.
- splistud 4y ago
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > I also think ageism is only part of the problem A big part of ageism is our complete devaluation of "soft skills." And we treat anything beyond the limits of cranking out code as soft skills.
fatnoah 4y ago
> as someone who is becoming an elder, I can't help but feel a touch of Schadenfreude when I see youngsters run face-first into stuff that I've predicted will happen I've learned some tact in my old age and no longer laugh when datetime formatting issues cause problems. I now act with empathy and gentle guidance.
- Thespian2 4y ago
  ISO-8601 for thew win. Accept no substitutes. But yes, "act with empathy and gentle guidance" is The Way. Also, never name you previous versions foo.new and foo.old or you will end up with foo.old.old.no-really-old, and foo.new2
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    > ISO-8601 for thew win. Accept no substitutes. Preach on!
zackmorris 4y ago
Not only that, but I predicted how things would go badly and they did. Now I struggle to find motivation in a world that made the opposite choice of what I recommended, nearly every step of the way, so all of the things that I wanted to do feel harder to achieve than ever before. I've come to realize that Winston Churchill's joke "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else" applies to everything, not just democracy and capitalism. In tech, you either find the right solution and get ahead of the pack long enough to make some money, or you watch helplessly as the pack applies brute force to whatever problem you were trying to solve and succeeds the hard way. Stuff like video cards and DALL-E 2 come to mind. Visionary ideas bordering on magic succeed (delayed by decades) not due to the current "state of the art" in tech, but despite it. And that work is important, because exhaustively eliminating every other potential solution in the problem space represents the real work of solving problems. That's what an economy is (churn). So I've been learning to let go, practice nonattachment, drop expectation in all forms, and just be grateful as we head towards the Singularity around 2040 and the decline of the natural world between 2050 and 2100 if people and AI working together can't save the planet. Being clever doesn't matter anymore, effort doesn't matter anymore, because someone somewhere will invent whatever idea you're working on, yesterday, and keep all of the money for themselves. The greatest failure of our time is that tech not only can't deliver its own end-goal (UBI, freedom from forced labor, self-actualization for all people), it actively stands in its way by fostering wealth inequality. The only winning move is not to play.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bobajeff 4y ago
As someone not in the software field who finds themself with people imparting wisdom frequently. I find that personally many times it's better to learn by trying even if someone who knows better than you says otherwise. As for those of you who don't feel heard in work or life let me just say that that's no excuse not to try. Especially if it's of great importance. Even if you have to stick your neck out under a guillotine in order to say it. I imagine if that guy at NASA who discovered the fatal flaw in Challenger didn't stop at telling the NASA heads but maybe the news, the astronauts and even their families it could have been prevented.

jason-phillips 4y ago

Your role is not to prevent that from happening. Your role is to do your job and set an example, which the younglings will remember years down the road. Those are two different things.

tokamak-teapot 4y ago

It is, but I’ve watched companies who were doing well start hiring younger, cheaper -10x developers and people losing their incomes, pensions etc. because they listened to the ’cheap’ and trendy-seeming who were eager to people-please and ignorant of their ignorance. The reverse is true, of course. ‘Expert beginners’ and those just looking to avoid any hard work or responsibility until they retire are equally as dangerous. If you’re a non-technical business owner, manager or anyone else who relies on tech and the people who build and run it, it is completely impossible to choose wisely, as you simply don’t know who to believe. I’ve got myself to positions of high trust in companies and then found my advice ignored both when I warn against: 1. Hiring those I can see are not just bad value but going to destroy tech and teams through arrogance and being given more responsibility than they should have (yet). 2. Leaving the dangerously incompetent ‘seniors’ and workshy in positions where they are either preventing any kind of growth or, worse, accelerating a death spiral which ends in either zero ability to compete or a tech disaster of some kind (lost or corrupted data, breach, etc.) If you’re trusted, that doesn’t mean that your advice to spend some time building smaller teams of actually competent people - or whatever your proposal is, will be heeded. The smell of money over a short term (or lack of it) are usually going to win.

HPsquared 4y ago
I like the phrase "-10x developers"... whose work has a net negative value 10 times the value added by an average developer (haven't heard it before, but surely such people exist!)
- andrew_ 4y ago
  what's wild is that several YC companies that have frequently-featured job posts on HN explicitly state they want 10x engineers. Kable is one: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kable/jobs/h3wKq6F-founding-backend-software-engineer https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kable/jobs/h3wKq6F-fou... > You are a 10x engineer, capable of getting more done than others and in a fraction of the time.
  - biztos 4y ago
    You are a mind capable of bridging space and time, but have only three years of experience, and don’t have a job at FAANG already, and will value 0.5% of common stock as fifty percent of your total compensation. Because your code is bulletproof and so is our coffee!

stillkicking 4y ago

It's only a spectator sport if you're not downstream from those changes though. I also think ageism is only part of the problem, it's stubbornness in general. Even if you're younger, it's difficult to translate hard-earned experience into respect because many engineers are infatuated with their own designs and algorithms. I've had people reject my advice even though I literally worked 2 years on app dedicated to solving that specific problem we were having. Of course they had egg on their face at the first demo. And they're still using that broken code.

splistud 4y ago
drewcoo 4y ago
> I also think ageism is only part of the problem A big part of ageism is our complete devaluation of "soft skills." And we treat anything beyond the limits of cranking out code as soft skills.

fatnoah 4y ago

> as someone who is becoming an elder, I can't help but feel a touch of Schadenfreude when I see youngsters run face-first into stuff that I've predicted will happen I've learned some tact in my old age and no longer laugh when datetime formatting issues cause problems. I now act with empathy and gentle guidance.

Thespian2 4y ago
ISO-8601 for thew win. Accept no substitutes. But yes, "act with empathy and gentle guidance" is The Way. Also, never name you previous versions foo.new and foo.old or you will end up with foo.old.old.no-really-old, and foo.new2
- fatnoah 4y ago
  > ISO-8601 for thew win. Accept no substitutes. Preach on!

zackmorris 4y ago

Not only that, but I predicted how things would go badly and they did. Now I struggle to find motivation in a world that made the opposite choice of what I recommended, nearly every step of the way, so all of the things that I wanted to do feel harder to achieve than ever before. I've come to realize that Winston Churchill's joke "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else" applies to everything, not just democracy and capitalism. In tech, you either find the right solution and get ahead of the pack long enough to make some money, or you watch helplessly as the pack applies brute force to whatever problem you were trying to solve and succeeds the hard way. Stuff like video cards and DALL-E 2 come to mind. Visionary ideas bordering on magic succeed (delayed by decades) not due to the current "state of the art" in tech, but despite it. And that work is important, because exhaustively eliminating every other potential solution in the problem space represents the real work of solving problems. That's what an economy is (churn). So I've been learning to let go, practice nonattachment, drop expectation in all forms, and just be grateful as we head towards the Singularity around 2040 and the decline of the natural world between 2050 and 2100 if people and AI working together can't save the planet. Being clever doesn't matter anymore, effort doesn't matter anymore, because someone somewhere will invent whatever idea you're working on, yesterday, and keep all of the money for themselves. The greatest failure of our time is that tech not only can't deliver its own end-goal (UBI, freedom from forced labor, self-actualization for all people), it actively stands in its way by fostering wealth inequality. The only winning move is not to play.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bobajeff 4y ago

As someone not in the software field who finds themself with people imparting wisdom frequently. I find that personally many times it's better to learn by trying even if someone who knows better than you says otherwise. As for those of you who don't feel heard in work or life let me just say that that's no excuse not to try. Especially if it's of great importance. Even if you have to stick your neck out under a guillotine in order to say it. I imagine if that guy at NASA who discovered the fatal flaw in Challenger didn't stop at telling the NASA heads but maybe the news, the astronauts and even their families it could have been prevented.