[jpdoctor]

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.

[drumdance]

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]

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]

Very much so.

Great quote btw. It made me google it-- seems Cory Harvey Armstrong. is the author, whoever that is.

[pvnick]

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?

[jpdoctor]

Great questions, answers inline.

> Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

None, but I might be a weird case. When I finished grad school, I was hired by TI, then Bell Labs. Both treated me like royalty. Because I am not satisfied with being treated like royalty, I went out and founded a company during 2000. I raised a ton of money from VCs (money was free back then). Bootstrapped another. So I've been running my own businesses ever since.

> Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

A bunch of years in there were hardware hacking. So lots of C and C++ through the 90s, some perl for maintainance. Never saw the need for trendy stuff until I saw Ruby on Rails. That made light work of projects I had in front of me.

> 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?

Largest management position was CTO of an 85 person company. I'm happy to manage people, and believe that I can manage over the range of herding-cats to drill-Sargent. I definitely prefer the role of Field Marshall to General, ie rolling in the mud with the troops compared to suit-and-tie rub-elbows-with-those-who-need-their-elbows-rubbed.

Lately though: All hacking + customer management. We're growing, so I suspect managing more people is going to be back in my future.

[pvnick]

Thank you for your thoughtful response!

[Oculus]

Yes, thank you for your short write up! Really interesting read :)

[mindcrime]

Another "old person" chiming in...

Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

Not really, and not in a negative sense. I did have an experience once where my boss sent me out to help one of our younger consultants on an engagement because, as he put it, the client "wants to see somebody with some grey in their beard". IOW, my presence was largely not needed in the technical sense, but I was there to contribute "gravitas" and comfort to the client.

Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

I reject your distinction between "trendy" and "entrprisey". Enterprise software and systems rock, and there's significant overlap at the systems level anyway. You may see Scala, Hadoop, Mahout, Mesos, Spark, S4, Clojure, etc. as "trendy, non enterprise" technologies, while I'm spending my time thinking of ways to use that stuff in the enterprise. :-)

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?

I have never had, and will never have, any real desire to be in "management" at someone else's company. Now, being a founder/CEO, that's a different story. I love the idea of building a company, and building the kind of company I always wanted to work for. And I've always been fascinated by marketing and some other aspects of the business world. So for me to now be a founder and in a position to run a company, is a real blast in many ways (in other ways, it's a long, hard, tough, painful, slow slog).

[tehwalrus]

> "I was there to...comfort[ ]the client."

:( it's sad that this is sometimes required. Agism works both ways, I guess.

[beat]

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.

[YZF]

I've seen a lot of people around that age strike out on their own and start new businesses. I think that would be the "advancement" path for those who are interested in that.

[beat]

That's exactly where I'm at. Building a startup from 20 years of accumulated experience in enterprise. I see a massive pain point and no tool that really addresses it - just a bunch of hacks and workarounds that everyone uses.

I like a lot of things about enterprise development, but I dislike a bunch of things, too. If this all works, I get to create a startup environment and total control (much more pleasant working conditions) and the potential for more substantial reward, but I can keep working on problems I like to work on.

[eksith]

  > among good technical people

Good technical people appreciate others who are of equal or greater skill. And I've noticed older (no offense to you folks; I'm speaking relatively) people tend to abhor office politics and the like. Things got done because they needed to get done, not to further some hidden, convoluted, agenda.

Most of the people in the upper tiers got there in their early to mid 30s.

[vacri]

I think it's because generally as you get older, you realise that winning office politics points doesn't really give you any reward. Any small moment of gain is fleeting, and you exchange that for destructive behaviour.

It's not to say that older people can't be petty, just that proactively engaging in politics seems to be seen as not particularly worth it. My frame of reference is that I've just turned 40 - I will probably feel differently again in 10 years :)

[emp_]

Hell, I feel like peaking with 31. Constantly leaning towards an own business from where I stand.

[narrator]

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]

Or use the route I went: start your own consulting business.

[beat]

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.

[kfcm]

Another consideration is it all depends upon where you're located--geographically, company-wise, and technology area. At least in my observation.

Infrastructure tends to have less ageism than development/software engineering. Large corporations relatively less than start-ups (agism in corps is usually tied to/masked by salary level; "it's about cutting costs"). Midwest/rural areas less than large metros and "hip locations" (due mainly to smaller pools of potential employees).

[VLM]

"Midwest/rural areas less than large metros and "hip locations" (due mainly to smaller pools of potential employees)."

Unfortunately that has not been my experience at all. Aside from personal experience, I read constantly on HN about how you can walk in off the street and get a job in SV and NYC if you have any skills at all.

To say that's not the experience here would be an understatement. You pretty much have to know someone. One advantage of being in this game since '81 is I know a lot of people. A BSCS from a decent school will get you a job in midwest/rural, its just going to be entry level helpdesk resetting email passwords, or pulling cat5 cable. Probably about half of grads are underemployed, I see them at work all the time.

Not to say there's no advantages; if you can get one of the "good jobs" the standard of living is spectacular in midwest/rural compared to the coasts, and there's better recreation (well, depends on your personal likes/dislikes, etc). Culture is better, generally.

Every once in a while, I take a 90 minute, 100 MPH commuter train into downtown Chicago and remind myself why I don't want to live in a big city. Or go to a conference on the coasts, or visit Europe again. I don't live in a big city; that's why I can easily afford that kind of lifestyle.

[kfcm]

When first starting out many years (decades?!?) ago, I experienced what could best be called "reverse agism". Guys in their 40s-50s were concerned about hiring a 23-25 year old "wet-behind-the-ears" high-energy "kid" who might make them look bad. And there weren't many twenty-somethings around

Funny thing is, now that I'm in that 45-50 range, things have inverted. Now I rarely see someone above 40 or 45, unless it's management or infrastructure. It's all people in their late 20s, early 30s.

[tritchey]

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]

Yeah; but those thoughts are now 50 years out of date. That's why old people feel different; they are from another time.

[SiVal]

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.

[JoeAltmaier]

Pah. Why are old-people's 'experiences' not also 'plausible-sounding bad ideas' from another time? In fact, that's the only mechanism your pessimism permits.

I'd guess, instead, that these modern bad ideas are possibly good ideas that just don't jibe with your experience.

[SiVal]

Currently popular ideas are not the result of a historical meme ratchet, whereby ideas have only been replaced by better ideas. A cursory knowledge of history provides ample evidence that bad ideas have often reemerged and become the orthodoxy of the time, supplanting earlier hard-earned wisdom.

With that history in mind, the common notion that today's popular ideas are all wiser than any of the past can be seen as absurdly unlikely. Does that imply that all old ideas are better than new replacements? Of course not. It implies that some of them are.

It implies that if you are more interested in wisdom than in popularity, you should look beyond what is taken for granted as the orthodoxy of your own generation.

[jacques_chester]

"The past is a different country."

[dman]

That sounds very interesting. Any examples?

[GnarfGnarf]

Root cellars.

[tritchey]

Ooh, I like that.

[zwieback]

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]

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.

[lesterbuck]

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

[marshray]

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.

[elboru]

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

[crb3]

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.

[guelo]

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]

> 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]

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.

[djbender]

Age is only a number.

[gilrain]

And an approximate measure of the gradual deterioration of your body.

[rollo_tommasi]

And, sadly, the sharper edges of the mind...

[diydsp]

... and, happily, the accumulation of wisdom to direct the remaining sharpness ...

[fluidcruft]

Perhaps sharpness impairs wisdom.

[talles]

So, again, just a number :)

[leed25d]

Nothing sad about it. You are actually better able to see the big picture I would say.

[moheeb]

No, I would say you are better able to understand the big picture, but less able to see it ;)

[dasil003]

arrogance you mean?

[codebolt]

Not just any number. It's the number of whole orbits you've made around the sun since leaving your mothers womb.

[girvo]

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