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God these types of polls make me feel like a geezer. Just in case any of you whippersnappers are wondering what it feels like to start hacking in your teens an

God these types of polls make me feel like a geezer. Just in case any of you whippersnappers are wondering what it feels like to start hacking in your teens and continue (in one form or another) to be hacking into your late 40s: It is pretty much the same after the first cup of coffee in the morning. Where it differs is the lull in the afternoon makes me want to nap. (So I do.) The drag is that until I look in the mirror? I'd tell you I'm 20-something, and I have to genuinely remind myself that I'm pushing 50.

djbender 13y ago
Age is only a number.
- gilrain 13y ago
  And an approximate measure of the gradual deterioration of your body.
  - rollo_tommasi 13y ago
    And, sadly, the sharper edges of the mind...
    - diydsp 13y ago
      ... and, happily, the accumulation of wisdom to direct the remaining sharpness ...
      - fluidcruft 13y ago
        Perhaps sharpness impairs wisdom.
        talles 13y ago
        So, again, just a number :)
    - leed25d 13y ago
      Nothing sad about it. You are actually better able to see the big picture I would say.
      - moheeb 13y ago
        No, I would say you are better able to understand the big picture, but less able to see it ;)
    - dasil003 13y ago
      arrogance you mean?
- codebolt 13y ago
  Not just any number. It's the number of whole orbits you've made around the sun since leaving your mothers womb.
pvnick 13y ago
Have you encountered any agism in your line of work? Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff? Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?
- beat 13y ago
  I'm 48, and I haven't encountered ageism yet. I haven't seen it, among good technical people. The hard part is that by the time you're in your late 40s, you've probably peaked out on advancement. Even if you go into management (which isn't really "advancement"), you're just going to ceiling out there instead.
  - emp_ 13y ago
    Hell, I feel like peaking with 31. Constantly leaning towards an own business from where I stand.
    - narrator 13y ago
      Once you reach a certain salary as an engineer the only way to make more money is to go in as an owner either as an early hire in a startup or as a founder. You can also get stock options and wait for your company to get bought. Other than that it's pretty much all down hill.
      - kfcm 13y ago
        Or use the route I went: start your own consulting business.
        beat 13y ago
        That's the route of a lot of good people. I know so many great consultants in their 40s-50s, with superb skills and rich backgrounds.
  - 13y ago
zwieback 13y ago
For me it's actually better in my late 40s. I've seen enough fads come and go that I don't feel like I have to chase after them anymore.
- incompatible 13y ago
  Fads come but they never seem to go. Even COBOL is still out there in daily use. EVERTHING is still out there in daily use.
drumdance 13y ago
I can relate. I once saw a quote, maybe from Garrison Keillor? "Inside every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened."
- drumdance 13y ago
  On the flip side, one thing getting older does is give you perspective about what's really important in life. I definitely am much more attentive to health and relationships, for example.
  - jpdoctor 13y ago
    Very much so. Great quote btw. It made me google it-- seems Cory Harvey Armstrong. is the author, whoever that is.
tritchey 13y ago
I'm sliding down the other side of that distribution myself. One evening I was having dinner with my wife and her nearly 70 year old parents. Her mom made a comment that has stuck with me: "You know, we still think and feel the same way we did when we were your age."
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Yeah; but those thoughts are now 50 years out of date. That's why old people feel different; they are from another time.
  - SiVal 13y ago
    The older I get, the more interested I am in the thoughts of people from another time. I discovered long ago that there is far less continuity of wisdom than young people realize. There is a common assumption among young people that the best ideas of the past are carried forward while the failed ideas are left behind. This is true to some extent, but it is much less true than most young people seem to think. People vastly underestimate the gap between their theories and reality. Experience forces them to change some of their theories to ideas that seem less plausible but that turn out to correspond better to reality. When they try to pass these improved ideas on to younger people without the same experience, they are often rejected. They sound less plausible than what they and their young peers take for granted. If the younger people go on to have the same experiences as their parents, they might eventually recognize the wisdom of their elders' ideas, but if not, they might never realize how wrong they are and will easily pass the plausible-sounding bad ideas on to their own children. At some point, most of society can have a good chuckle at the old people's "out of date" ideas. Since each generation faces different experiences, we have a mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience keeps being lost and replaced by plausible-sounding bad ideas. You also have the mechanism whereby people point at one area that has clearly improved as evidence that today's ideas are better than those of the past. After all, today's telephone hardware is vastly better than the Lisp Machine of 50 years ago, so the design of HTML/CSS/Javascript platform must represent a substantial improvement on the best ideas from Common Lisp with the bad ideas removed. No? Well then there's another mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience in the past can be replaced by worse ideas that just happen to end up carried to popularity by historical circumstance. Just as I study how old-time engineers solved technical problems without using today's technologies, I try to study the writings of "old people" from ancient times to modern, and I try to learn from the "out of date" ideas that came from experiences I've never had. I find it contains more real wisdom than the taken-for-granted trendy theories popular among today's young elites. That of course makes me "feel different" and my thoughts "out of date", too.
elboru 13y ago
Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)?
- guelo 13y ago
  I feel like I learn new tech faster now, though it's probably just because I've seen similar things before. I feel like I'm doing my best work now.
- jpdoctor 13y ago
  > Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)? Hard to tell, but a speedup if anything. Once you know 5 or 6 languages, another one is pretty easy to pick up by looking at it. I've posted elsewhere: Most recent endeavor is RoR, and that was fast. It's hard for me to differentiate whether that's because I'm Mr Smart&Experienced or because Michael Hartl rocks. I suspect the latter.
  - moens 13y ago
    41 here. I have found the same thing. There are so many things in languages, paradigms, tech as a whole that are familiar... problems that took too long to solve 20 years ago are easier now because I know the feel of the problem, how to approach it, etc. Pretty sure I cannot put in as many hours though. Wish I had learned to put in fewer earlier.
- crb3 13y ago
  No, what I (currently 64) have noticed is a swift reduction in unbroken-focus time. Unlike in my 20's and 30's, I have personal responsibilities, now, y'see. We're not designed to preemptively multitask; I just crash my stack when I try. We can cooperatively multitask, but the context-switching has to planned ahead. Even then, interrupts are costly. Used to be there was nothing between me and putting in a sleepless weekend on a project except me and my fatigue, which enthusiasm overcame easily. Now I've got kids and elderly parents and they're not only interrupting, they're nonmaskable. Stack-crash, context-dump and a profound weariness from loss of momentum, next stop. I love it when I can shove in the earplugs, unplug the phone and dive in on a new learning adventure -- I hunger for that, it's part of who I am. Those times when I can trust the world to handshake timeslices and mask interrupts are very rare these days, however. From the outside it might look like slower learning; from in here, it's that the learning seldom gets any runtime.
lesterbuck 13y ago
It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.
marshray 13y ago
I was napping hard in the afternoons and staying up late as a teenager. I was hoping that would get better with age like it does for some people. But it hasn't for me.
girvo 13y ago
Damnit. I've started doing that nap thing, and I'm 22.

djbender 13y ago

Age is only a number.

gilrain 13y ago
And an approximate measure of the gradual deterioration of your body.
- rollo_tommasi 13y ago
  And, sadly, the sharper edges of the mind...
  - diydsp 13y ago
    ... and, happily, the accumulation of wisdom to direct the remaining sharpness ...
    - fluidcruft 13y ago
      Perhaps sharpness impairs wisdom.
      - talles 13y ago
        So, again, just a number :)
  - leed25d 13y ago
    Nothing sad about it. You are actually better able to see the big picture I would say.
    - moheeb 13y ago
      No, I would say you are better able to understand the big picture, but less able to see it ;)
  - dasil003 13y ago
    arrogance you mean?
codebolt 13y ago
Not just any number. It's the number of whole orbits you've made around the sun since leaving your mothers womb.

pvnick 13y ago

Have you encountered any agism in your line of work? Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff? Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

beat 13y ago
I'm 48, and I haven't encountered ageism yet. I haven't seen it, among good technical people. The hard part is that by the time you're in your late 40s, you've probably peaked out on advancement. Even if you go into management (which isn't really "advancement"), you're just going to ceiling out there instead.
- emp_ 13y ago
  Hell, I feel like peaking with 31. Constantly leaning towards an own business from where I stand.
  - narrator 13y ago
    Once you reach a certain salary as an engineer the only way to make more money is to go in as an owner either as an early hire in a startup or as a founder. You can also get stock options and wait for your company to get bought. Other than that it's pretty much all down hill.
    - kfcm 13y ago
      Or use the route I went: start your own consulting business.
      - beat 13y ago
        That's the route of a lot of good people. I know so many great consultants in their 40s-50s, with superb skills and rich backgrounds.
- 13y ago

zwieback 13y ago

For me it's actually better in my late 40s. I've seen enough fads come and go that I don't feel like I have to chase after them anymore.

incompatible 13y ago
Fads come but they never seem to go. Even COBOL is still out there in daily use. EVERTHING is still out there in daily use.

drumdance 13y ago

I can relate. I once saw a quote, maybe from Garrison Keillor? "Inside every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened."

drumdance 13y ago
On the flip side, one thing getting older does is give you perspective about what's really important in life. I definitely am much more attentive to health and relationships, for example.
- jpdoctor 13y ago
  Very much so. Great quote btw. It made me google it-- seems Cory Harvey Armstrong. is the author, whoever that is.

tritchey 13y ago

I'm sliding down the other side of that distribution myself. One evening I was having dinner with my wife and her nearly 70 year old parents. Her mom made a comment that has stuck with me: "You know, we still think and feel the same way we did when we were your age."

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Yeah; but those thoughts are now 50 years out of date. That's why old people feel different; they are from another time.
- SiVal 13y ago
  The older I get, the more interested I am in the thoughts of people from another time. I discovered long ago that there is far less continuity of wisdom than young people realize. There is a common assumption among young people that the best ideas of the past are carried forward while the failed ideas are left behind. This is true to some extent, but it is much less true than most young people seem to think. People vastly underestimate the gap between their theories and reality. Experience forces them to change some of their theories to ideas that seem less plausible but that turn out to correspond better to reality. When they try to pass these improved ideas on to younger people without the same experience, they are often rejected. They sound less plausible than what they and their young peers take for granted. If the younger people go on to have the same experiences as their parents, they might eventually recognize the wisdom of their elders' ideas, but if not, they might never realize how wrong they are and will easily pass the plausible-sounding bad ideas on to their own children. At some point, most of society can have a good chuckle at the old people's "out of date" ideas. Since each generation faces different experiences, we have a mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience keeps being lost and replaced by plausible-sounding bad ideas. You also have the mechanism whereby people point at one area that has clearly improved as evidence that today's ideas are better than those of the past. After all, today's telephone hardware is vastly better than the Lisp Machine of 50 years ago, so the design of HTML/CSS/Javascript platform must represent a substantial improvement on the best ideas from Common Lisp with the bad ideas removed. No? Well then there's another mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience in the past can be replaced by worse ideas that just happen to end up carried to popularity by historical circumstance. Just as I study how old-time engineers solved technical problems without using today's technologies, I try to study the writings of "old people" from ancient times to modern, and I try to learn from the "out of date" ideas that came from experiences I've never had. I find it contains more real wisdom than the taken-for-granted trendy theories popular among today's young elites. That of course makes me "feel different" and my thoughts "out of date", too.

elboru 13y ago

Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)?

guelo 13y ago
I feel like I learn new tech faster now, though it's probably just because I've seen similar things before. I feel like I'm doing my best work now.
jpdoctor 13y ago
> Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)? Hard to tell, but a speedup if anything. Once you know 5 or 6 languages, another one is pretty easy to pick up by looking at it. I've posted elsewhere: Most recent endeavor is RoR, and that was fast. It's hard for me to differentiate whether that's because I'm Mr Smart&Experienced or because Michael Hartl rocks. I suspect the latter.
- moens 13y ago
  41 here. I have found the same thing. There are so many things in languages, paradigms, tech as a whole that are familiar... problems that took too long to solve 20 years ago are easier now because I know the feel of the problem, how to approach it, etc. Pretty sure I cannot put in as many hours though. Wish I had learned to put in fewer earlier.
crb3 13y ago
No, what I (currently 64) have noticed is a swift reduction in unbroken-focus time. Unlike in my 20's and 30's, I have personal responsibilities, now, y'see. We're not designed to preemptively multitask; I just crash my stack when I try. We can cooperatively multitask, but the context-switching has to planned ahead. Even then, interrupts are costly. Used to be there was nothing between me and putting in a sleepless weekend on a project except me and my fatigue, which enthusiasm overcame easily. Now I've got kids and elderly parents and they're not only interrupting, they're nonmaskable. Stack-crash, context-dump and a profound weariness from loss of momentum, next stop. I love it when I can shove in the earplugs, unplug the phone and dive in on a new learning adventure -- I hunger for that, it's part of who I am. Those times when I can trust the world to handshake timeslices and mask interrupts are very rare these days, however. From the outside it might look like slower learning; from in here, it's that the learning seldom gets any runtime.

lesterbuck 13y ago

It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.

marshray 13y ago

I was napping hard in the afternoons and staying up late as a teenager. I was hoping that would get better with age like it does for some people. But it hasn't for me.

girvo 13y ago

Damnit. I've started doing that nap thing, and I'm 22.