Me 3! 56, first prog job was in '87. Now I'm steadily employed in a dream job, working from home, writing mobile apps and exploring new "IoT" technologies. If this job ends, which all jobs do sooner or later, I'm hoping to starting my own company, finally, and ride that into retirement. But life continues to be an adventure and you never know what lies around the next bend in the road!!! Best of luck to you and to people of all ages in this amazing field.
Just turned 50 yesterday. Wrote my first contract program in 1982 when I was 17.
Today I teach teams how to rock-and-roll. I also keep coding, but mostly as a hobby. It has nothing to do with programming -- I simply have too many irons in the fire to do all of the things I love as much as I want to.
I guess I might as well pile on. Turned 50 last year. Got my first paycheck for writing code junior year of high school (writing BASIC code on a Commodore PET!) Working on my fifth startup now.
I can't imagine all the technologies and skills you guys have acquired.
If I may derail the conversation a little bit, may I ask if/how you use the things you've learned today?
I mean, is it things like paradigms that have stuck with you like OOP/functional/w\e, or do you always structure your exception handling in a certain way, no matter the language? Are there skills/technologies you've been using since you've started? For example little scripts of basic that you've never let go off that automate things like setting up build servers and the like?
SCHiM: "is it things like paradigms that have stuck with you..."
For me it's always been about problem solving rather than simple fascination with some particular technology. If I can solve a problem with a keyboard macro in Emacs, great. If it requires Perl or Java or javascript, so be it.
I try to use the tool that's appropriate. If I can solve a problem quickly and move onto something more interesting, one-and-done.
If I have to stop and learn something new (e.g., WKWebView in iOS ObjC) to get my task done, so be it, and I'll put in some late nights to get there because at my age, I'm a bit paranoid about looking bad so I try to give the good folks at HQ no reason to doubt me. I spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow and Youtube doing concentrated learning.
But the real thing is what others have also mentioned: properly defining a problem that needs to be solved, proper communication, keep good records, and try to maintain transparency, honesty, and pleasant comportment at all times.
Honestly the older I get, the less I notice people's age. If someone half my age knows something I don't, then the way I see it, they have something to teach me. I've been to many conferences and watched many youtube tutorials where the teacher was very young (from my wizened perspective) but the information is why I'm there and that's all I care about.
What do I think about young people? (you didn't ask but I'm saying it anyway)
I love young people. They have so much spirit, so much energy and creativity. I keep hearing critical (snarky) things about millennials this, X-gen that. But I don't see it. The young people I've been around (for a while I was back in school full time, surrounded by 20-somethings and a few 30-somethings) were a joy. Fun, humorous, inquisitive.
Everyone has his faults, not least myself, and I believe as we get older we become more tolerant of others' faults and shortcomings. In fact that may be the single hallmark of growing older (apart from physical issues).
No more BASIC, but I still code in Common Lisp whenever I can. And I'm using some library code that I wrote when I was in grad school 25 years ago.
Once you grok Lisp, everything else is easy. You come to realize that the vast majority of what passes for "new technologies" is really just a re-discovery of something that exists (or is easily implemented) in CL. That makes it a lot easier (if a tad frustrating at times) to keep up.
EDIT: CLOS, and generic functions in particular, are a HUGE lever that no other language has co-opted yet.
You come to realize that the vast majority of what passes for "new technologies" is really just a re-discovery of something that exists (or is easily implemented) in CL
So much this. (From a soon-to-be geezer who's staring down 40 soon.)
GOOPS[0] in guile is definitely hugely inspired by CLOS, which also has generic functions with multi-method dispatch.
I highly recommend guile to anyone who wants the battery included nature of common lisp. I know that racket is also a great choice here, I just have little experience with it.
I'm not quite in the same age range, but north of 40, and have been doing this for > 20 years.
The tech changes - I don't use BASIC or Z80 machine code day to day. The skills that I can speak to, and the skills I see from others with this level of experience, are problem solving and communication, and secondarily the confidence that comes from having made mistakes. Few projects fail miserably solely due to technical issues and skill; in my experience failures come about because of poor communication (including documentation, but also speaking, reading body language, office politics, etc).
We younger folks are incredibly curious about what you've learned. Can you elaborate on the topics you mentioned or recommend other sources? Can you give tips on best practices?
Interesting the pattern in this thread - I'm 57 and started in 1973!
There's plenty of languages I've used over the years that I have no use for today, or hardly even remember: Basic, FORTRAN, assembler, Pascal. None of those languages even had exception handling, so it's hard to say that it influenced my thinking on the subject, except by forcing me to be familiar with the alternatives.
Today it's C++ and C# that pay the bills, with as much Python as I can sneak in. Next up in the queue is Javascript, for which I'm admittedly overdue, but that one's entirely on my own time.
Just curious, as you moved from language to language do you think there were any patterns as far as the timing of your moves? Did you jump into new languages as they emerged or wait for them to reach a stable mindshare within your peers? Or perhaps waited until you needed to pick up a new language in order to pay the bills?
Here is the first program I ever entered into a computer.
1 8
+ A 5
+ 0 0
+ 6 5
+ 0 1
+ 8 5
+ F A
+ A 9
+ 0 0
+ 8 5
+ F B
+ 4 C
+ 4 F
+ 1 C
I remember how much like some kind of incantation it was. I still get that feeling. And I've had the good fortune to work some fun, powerful, and interesting magic with those incantations.
I suspect that most younger people haven't yet seen their tech choices slip into decay and disuse. And they hang on tightly, hoping to expend less effort in learning as time goes by and they master that tech. It's a vain hope. The essential part of the experience is the underlying creativity, the joy of getting to the next ledge, and really understanding what a marvelous thing a computer is.
I fell as you guys. I am very excited with technology since I started. There is so much new and interesting things to play and read that I have no time to do it all.
I can clearly that each year more and more interesting things appear. The speed is also increasing, in way I can't digest it all. It's difficult what to choose, to prioritize is the key to deal with it.
I always get myself wondering how much new things I will see next years.
I'll be 52 this November. Have been coding mostly as a hobby since '83, with peaks in programming intensity at different stages of my life: sometimes to scratch an itch and sometimes doing some contract/consulting work. Still try to hit the computer whenever I can, but my health's been letting me down lately - nothing too bad, but it's been affecting the focused time I need to do programming right.
So now when I sometimes think of my mortality, the thing I regret is the programming I can't do when I'm gone. Or maybe there is programming after death? I'm hopeful. :)
In the meanwhile, the free time that's opened up from not programming as much is being wisely invested. I'm working hard on my guitar, and before I go dammit, I'm going to shred like a pro!
Almost 51 and I'm only a couple years away from my 40th programming anniversary. I can't imagine doing anything else ... I get paid but it's not work for me!