Why Coding At Fifty May Be Nifty

theodp writes "Enough with the dadgum naysayers. Google's Vivek Haldar lists some good reasons for why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age). Haldar's list would probably get a thumbs-up from billionaire SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, who had this to say about coding when interviewed at age 56: 'I would be happy if I just stayed in my office and programmed all day, to tell you the truth. That is my one real love in life is programming. Programming is sort of like getting to work a puzzle all day long. I actually enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable. You get to shut out all your other thoughts and just concentrate on this little thing you're trying to do, to make work it. It's nice, very enjoyable.'"

Comments

40

[petronije]

... and still coding

Re:40

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 51 IT manager, not allowed to code at work but I code as soon as I get home. Thank goodness for OSS.

Re:40

[Ramley]

... and still coding

/ Very nice!

I'm 48, and wish I had another 24 years to do all of the things I want to do coding-wise alone. I haven't learned it all yet, and still want to know how everything works.

It's a great lifestyle after all this time. I own my own firm, work from my home office, get out to the boat on Fridays and work from there if needed (during summer), and make my own time to work on my own terms.

Coding at 48 is great!

Re:40

[SQLGuru]

Ditto.

Whether I do it for work or for play, I'll always code.

Re:40

[sudon't]

I had no interest in computers back in the CLI days. In fact, I remember my friend bringing home some computer you hooked up to a TV, (I wish I knew what that thing was), and had to program in BASIC. I don't believe it had any storage. I couldn't understand why anyone would want a computer at home. But, as an artist, when the first MacIntosh computers came out in the early eighties, I was hooked. TypeStyler was the first software I purchased. Then, many years later, OS X came out, and I taught myself a little unix. Later, I taught myself regex because, with grep, it is useful for solving word puzzles, and is a bit of a puzzle to solve in itself. Now I'm 53, and just now beginning to teach myself some shell scripting. It's never too late to learn something new.

Re:40

[Seumas]

Yeah, I don't get the age thing. If you can still play a professional sport at 40+ (boxers, baseball players, etc), then why the fuck couldn't you sit in a chair and peck at a keyboard at 40, 50, 60?

Re:40

[antdude]

Who is doing SQA testing after 40 years old? I am almost there, but I still do SQA testing.

Re:40

[Stoutlimb]

I find any kind of fun puzzle like work like programming or CAD are only enjoyable outside of a normal work environment. Once you get into the realm of bosses with deadlines of the day before the project start, and customers who don't want to pay, and the fun game of blame the coder drama to get out of contracts but still get the goods, it's not fun anymore. I recommend people code for fun at any age, working in the industry should be approached with great care.

Re:40

[WaywardGeek]

In 1981, my high school counselor, for reasons unclear to me, found me a job programming in Fortran at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, for $4/hour. I was in Heaven and knew that I'd do it for the rest of my life, even at minimum wage. Today, on Sunday, I wrote code for two or three hours on an audio stack for screen readers for the blind. I still love it. I'm just lucky that industry decided to pay me more than minimum wage.

Re:40

[Meski]

51 ^^^^

When one is tired of coding, they are tired of life. - Samuel Johnson, updated

tell that to the bean counters

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in, programmers would prefer to continue programming at 50.

Re:tell that to the bean counters

[wdef]

This is modded -1? Why? The poster is saying that we shouldn't be surprised that people who like coding want to continue coding regardless of age but that ageist stereotypes (wrongly) insist that all coders should be scabby teens.

The Brain is Plastic

[mrbluze]

And so if you keep programming, you keep learning and stave off brain rot.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that what creates PHBs?

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Oligonicella]

You posted AC because you know damned well that the roles are actually reversed from your post.

On both counts.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

You posted AC because you know damned well that the roles are actually reversed from your post. On both counts.

Really? Just try earning a little extra money for your family by getting a second job, a part time service job because you are lucky to have one good job in the first place in this economy and more menial work that youre not too proud to do is all you can get for a second one. See who asks you where something is when they're standing right in front of it. Hint: they're all over 50. See who just can't fathom that the big sign visible from anywhere in the store saying SPORTING GOODS is where one might find fishing gear, hint, they're all over 50. Somehow the under-50 crowd makes the connection on their own. I could give countless examples.

Now I am happy to help out and all of that but demand for my services is much, MUCH higher among the over-50 crowd. The same people who claim they should get special respect because of their accumulated wisdom and life experience, yet they seem confounded over the most basic things that no one else has trouble with.

Now really I don't think they are stupid. I think they feel entitled to be served. That is why they are so rude and impatient and unappreciative of the help they do get. I think they get their jollies from demeaning and degrading anyone expected to be subservient to them, makes them feel important, especially the ones who have a little money. Maybe it's because this is an area where older people like to move to, to retire, and they have some money enough to be upper middle class and think that makes them the Kennedies or something. But when I personally interact with the Baby Boomers and I see what they are really like, in a way that their boss does not, it makes perfect sense to me that these are people who would leave their children and grandchildren with a bankrupt nation.

As the saying goes, you want to see what a man is really like, don't look at how he talks to his boss. Look at how he treats the waitstaff. That will reveal his true character. Honestly before I swallowed my pride and took a second menial job to provide for my family, and had to serve these old people, before then I never thought any less of them. Now I know, in a way that you don't if you have never done the same. All you see of them is sweet old Grandma baking cookies or something, well let me tell you that is not the whole story.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why so many under 30 demand handholding for the most basic tasks? I'm talkin REAL BASIC stuff here. Tasks they somehow manage to do themselves anyway if no handholding is available? And here I was thinking it was just their massive entitlement mentality.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[JustOK]

Who paid for your schools, medical care, transportation and all the other infrastructure that you use? Not you.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Count Fenring]

I was born and raised in FLORIDA and I still think you're being kind of an ageist jerk here.

I've seen that behavior in over-50s, I've seen it in under-50s. Entitlement isn't an age issue, it's a class issue, or sometimes just a personality issue.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Terje Mathisen]

The reason that over-50 crowd is asking for help is almost certainly due to deteriorating eyesight and glasses!

First of all, a 50 year old needs 3X the light level as a 20-30 year old, second the progressive glasses most of has to start wearing at this time takes a huge slice out of the normal visual field:

I used to be able to easily locate things that were near the edge of my visual field, with my current (very good/expensive) glasses I need to turn my entire head, not just flick a glance sidewise.

This does mean that I find it far harder to locate items in the Supermarket/grocery store, unless it is the local one where I know where everything is located.

It also means that I will ask store attendants for directions to stuff that I would simply find on my own 15 years ago, simply because I know it will probably save me a lot of time.

Terje

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[fustakrakich]

Is that why so many over 50 demand handholding for the most basic tasks?

You know you're right? I still have to ask how you turn off the damn computer.. But I'm fully Y2K compliant

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[wdef]

Right! I dunno how many times I have told UX designers (nearly always under 30 and just babies, really) that I cannot read their tiny crap on tiny devices. Cannot. Have to get out glasses. They always ignore it. Considering throwing away my crappy phone for this very reason.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, you are correct specifically in reference to the baby boomer generation. I work at Walmart and people of that age are much more likely to be pricks. However, I had a guy who later told me he was 85 looking to get stuff to do his own oil change and he was one of the most polite people I've ever encountered.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I see your points now, but I have a story from my own life that I hope you consider.

I used to manage a self storage facility. People from all walks of life used it, but some people were become such a problem (couldn't pay their bill on time, got mad that we auctioned their stuff off after not hearing a peep from them for a few (4 to 6) months (no payments at all), had no valid means to contact them, etc. It was very easy to start to feel anyone who used that sort of business was a low-life after a while. But when I actually looked at the numbers, the vast majority of people paid their bills (and most on time), and never got auctioned off. Some ven used it for years faithfully. But those people I hardly ever talked to because they weren't trying to cause any problems, so it was easy to forget they even existed. The problem cases were only around 5%, but I spent 90% of my time dealing with them, so my gut instinct made them seem to be the majority. And yes, those people were usually poor, but most poor people still paid their bills, or removed their stuff to prevent being a problem.

In short, don't get into the trap of thinking because most people who treat you like crap are over 50 that most people over 50 will treat you like crap.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I long for you to be their age. What you said that old people are grumpy isn't something revolutionary or new, it's that way. They have Vitamin D deficiency, pains everywhere, and much more. And if you can't differentiate between bad personality and age mechanics then you shouldn't be working with older people both for their sake and yours.

I never heard of it before, but polarizing between humans of different age. WTF, I bet you are the 80:s generation. The fucking entitled generation, just as you described the oldies, maybe you are just "jealous". Twat.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[JosephTX]

"Paid for"? Funny!

But seriously, though, you must not be in America, because medical care isn't considered infrastructure here. And the rest of what older generations have left for my generation is pretty laughable. Transportation is horribly inefficient pretty much anywhere outside NYC because all the baby boomers need their own McMansion with their own lawns and gardens, most likely tended by the same people they say should be deported. So now the tallest buildings in most cities are two-story houses, and it's impossible to simply go get groceries without a giant gas-guzzling 5-to-8-seat car that you only drive in alone/with one other person 99% of the time.

And educational quality is horrible in the US for 2 reasons: bad/absent parenting and politically-connected textbook publishers (both of which are, again, on older generations) that put profit ahead of textbook quality; and don't forgot the massive tuition rates my generation is having to pay just for the CHANCE of making a comparable salary (adjusted for inflation) to what our parents made without a degree 30 years ago.

And then there's the retirement age, which is pretty much going to be stuck at 65 for the next few decades so everyone currently above 50 gets to retire by then, effectively contributing to the economy for maybe half of the 80+ years they'll be around. But even all that isn't enough; older people also want lower taxes, which is effectively the same as passing the bill to their kids/grandkids/great-grandkids/great-great/ and so on, because they aren't even willing to give back to society just like society gave to them when they were our age. And let's not even get started on the wonderful global climate disasters we get to inherit while our parents and grandparents are long gone.

And then after all that, older generations accuse ME of being entitled and self-centered? Your generation doesn't exactly get to act morally superior. Like one of the parent posters said, entitlement isn't an age issue, just a personality issue.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[zkiwi34]

At least the over 50's crowd can find the store, in all likelihood "the younger set" don't even know what sporting goods are.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Techie in my Mid-40's, I find it the opposite. Its the 20's and 30's that need the handholding. Most of the young Techies I work with, know one thing. Ask them to do something a wee bit out of there scope and the go to pieces like a cheap suit! The 20's & 30's something come to me when they get stumped.

Me thinks you are using non-Techie +49 year olds as your reference point, not comparing 20-30 Techies with older techies. Much like comparing apples with sour cream. Perhaps most 20-30s know how to use technology, but only a very small number of them are real techies that can develop the gizmos (IPhones, FB, Twitter, etc) they use. Most of the Gizmos the 20's use where designed and programmed by the 30-50's. The reason why +40 years olds don't know all of the bells and whistles of the latest gizmos is because they are busying working, paying the bills and the 20-30's living in there parents basement have plenty of time.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to private school, my father paid tuition. I paid for my college courses with cash. I drive my own car (not leased) on roads that my taxes paid for.
Based on your question, I can safely assume I paid a non zero amount for yours.
Orwell was an optimist.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[sudon't]

Yeah, I believe they have a name for that syndrome - cop syndrome, or something, please correct me if I'm wrong - where all you see are the worst cases. For instance, if you work in a hospital emergency room, the only drug users you see are the ones who have gotten in trouble with it somehow, so you see all drug users as drug abusers. Same with cops. Almost everyone they see is a criminal, so they begin to see everyone as criminals. But to respond to the first poster, as a 53 year-old, I can tell you that when I walk into a Wal-Mart, I am still amazed that there is nobody around to help you. I think we all grew up with a different service paradigm. It used to be that you couldn't get rid of helpful sales clerks when you walked into a store. Now it's the opposite extreme, and perhaps we haven't quite gotten used to it.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[george14215]

The strongest societies (by a number of objective measures) are the ones that have a healthy respect for the elderly and their past contributions.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[GrantRobertson]

Amen to that, Brother. I am 52 but most people think I am in my late 30s. Problem is: I have to juggle three DIFFERENT pair of progressive bi-focals just to see what the hell I am doing. This is partly due to all the time I have spent reading and on the computer, partly just due to heredity. I don't know how many times I have been looking for something that was right in front of me.

But this has nothing to do with programming. Or one's IQ.

I think your last statement does apply, though. Older people are less ego driven and more willing to ask questions. The younger coders may not be asking the questions simply because they don't want to appear stupid. So they waste hours Googling things when they could have just asked someone and gotten on with their day. People need to remember that the reason people all go to the same place to get work done is so they can actually interact with those other people who go there too. This was found to be more efficient ... oh ... maybe a few thousand years ago.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[GrantRobertson]

This is called "selection bias." It is when you assume that what you see or notice most often is actually the majority.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed - if you're 50ish or older and haven't done so, volunteer at your local public school in some sort of classroom role -- unless you don't want to be shocked and discover why the US is having so many problems and we need to import most of our engineers.

Over 40 years ago, when I was junior high/middle school, when the class was told to be quiet, they were (but, they rarely had to be told to do so because they understood that when the teacher was talking, one should be quiet) -- now the teacher has to do so several times each class period. It was fairly rare to hear a student ask "is this right?" -- now many students ask this about EVERY problem they do because they have not learned to take ownership and responsibility for their work product. Of course, if the teacher disciplines a kid, Mom is on the phone complaining to the principal/dean within minutes of hearing how her perfect little monster was admonished by the mean teacher in front of the whole class for doing nothing ("nothing", in reality, being throwing paper airplanes after having been warned multiple times not to do so).

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, yes I did -- and more than that (apparently, I also paid your share). Speak for yourself if you think all that came from a magic pot of money because you are not productive enough to have paid your share of taxes for such things. Some of us have.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[boudie2]

I guess that means you'll be jumping off a building when YOU turn 50. Spoken like a true anonymous coward.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[felix rayman]

You drive your car on roads that our taxes paid for.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[gnasher719]

Right! I dunno how many times I have told UX designers (nearly always under 30 and just babies, really) that I cannot read their tiny crap on tiny devices. Cannot. Have to get out glasses. They always ignore it. Considering throwing away my crappy phone for this very reason.

Thanks, Dell, for your 27 inch 1920 x 1200 display (I think they changed it 1920 x 1080 now, bastards!) Thanks, Apple, for a MBP with 1440 x 900 Retina display. Which _can_ be switched to higher resolution, but rarely is.

BTW, at the moment I have to take my glasses _off_ to read tiny crap on tiny devices. I know that will change.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[LifesABeach]

You might want to recheck your data. The current estimate of Global Hording of US Currency is at 31 Trillion dollars. The people with money are not spending theirs, and are telling you to spend yours. Why?

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Bill Dog]

"Thanks, Dell, for your 27 inch 1920 x 1200 display"

It's a nice, relaxed .30 dot pitch after staring intently at code on a 23" 1920 x 1080 all day. I couldn't come home to more of that same.

Unfortunately it looks like ass with IE9's new partial-pixel font rendering and I had to uninstall it. The pixels on this are too big to not readily show the fuzzing (smoothing) that algorithm is doing.

What older eyes really need is 2560 x 1600 and fonts enlarged via OS DPI settings. I'm hoping in a couple of years they'll be available as non gray market and not 30" and $1250 either.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried progressive bifocals (am 55 now), but found that i had to turn my head to see things to side clearly. I switched to non-progressive bifocals and like them much better.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[rpopescu]

>>    Is that why so many over 50 demand handholding for the most basic tasks?  I'm talkin REAL BASIC stuff here.  Tasks they somehow manage to do themselves anyway if no handholding is available?
>>    And here I was thinking it was just their massive entitlement mentality.

Pray tell, what part of the programming world does your experience apply to? Thanks.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[bigtreeman]

Hey that's me, my new glasses clear the fog vision but it's not the same as when I was young.
I get off the computer when I can't see any more, can't be good.
My next device is a paper white Kindle running Linux,
so I can take it down to the beach, get off my ass,
get out of the office, get out in the sun and build up my vitamin D.

Programming is great fun, but it does get in the way of life, especially contact with real people.

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

entitlement isn't an age issue, just a personality issue.

Truer words could not have been written to finish a post that is full of nothing but whining and "I am a victim, look how they're victimizing me"!

Re:The Brain is Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

And then there's the retirement age, which is pretty much going to be stuck at 65 for the next few decades so everyone currently above 50 gets to retire by then...

You're lucky, in a few decades the retirement age in the UK will probably be in the 70s.. That's what you get for medical care being considered 'infrastructure'..

Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

As for me at 48, sitting in front of the computer all day just pains me - literally. No matter how often I take breaks, I have a lot of tension that runs down from my neck to my ass. Yoga doesn't help either.

It also pains me intellectually and emotionally - it's boring. Its' just a tool to solve some other problem I have. I can't wait for the day when I can tell the computer verbally or draw a picture the algorithm and never ever have to type another line of code - ever.

Typing code isn't that far away from the days of moving jumper wires around to program the computer. Programmers stopped that in the 1950s and here we are still typing?!? If programming technology moved as fast as hardware tech, we'd be programming with brain waves or something. Coding is just so - backwards.

Typing! Give me fucking break!

Re:Good for you!

[kwikrick]

If coding is like typing for you, you've never done any real programming. Coding is about thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems. I don't think that's boring at all.

Re:Good for you!

[Dan9999]

Sounds like you just don't like the language you're using to program. Understandable, I'm sure you're not the only one.

Although many enjoy the challenge and have gotten past language issues long ago. That, I think, is also one of the perks of experience.

Re:Good for you!

[vlm]

As for me at 48, sitting in front of the computer all day just pains me - literally. No matter how often I take breaks, I have a lot of tension that runs down from my neck to my ass.

That's exactly how I felt at age 19 as I was stacking 80 pound salt bags on pallets for roughly $5/hr. About a week after I got my first "real" desk job, the most surprising observation I had, other than the obvious "now I take a shower before work rather than after work" was that I wasn't in some level of constant pain. Getting old is no fun but it beats the alternative, and I'm not thinking there's anything that can help once you get old enough, by that I mean that stacking 80 pound salt bags would probably just kill me at my current age, not make my back feel better. I had back problems a couple years back until I (re-)started serious (as in, need a shower afterwards) weightlifting during lunch hour, the key being if your physical therapist says do X Y and Z do exactly X Y Z no improvising or excuses.

I can't wait for the day when I can tell the computer verbally or draw a picture the algorithm and never ever have to type another line of code - ever.

The bandwidth for that is almost infinitely low compared to typing. You'd basically have to invent your own glyphs and language, or spend hours drawing thousands of pictures. You may want to look into the CAD drafting profession, where you get to spend hours drawing the equivalent of a couple lines of text. Another fun one is wedding photography.

Also try a less verbose language. I've seen 1000+ line java programs replaced by about 5 lines of Perl/CPAN... two use statements, two cpan calls, and an immense line noise appearing regex between them. Unsurprisingly, neither extreme is healthy.

Re:Good for you!

[jcr]

It also pains me intellectually and emotionally - it's boring.

I'm the same age as you, and it sounds to me like you're working on things that don't interest you. I like coding, as long as what I'm writing is solving an interesting problem.

-jcr

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had an account, I would mod this troll.

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

To listen to you, we'd be surrounded by nimble, flexible, elegant software. That's far from the reality. So tell me, where is all this elegant software?

Re:Good for you!

[narcc]

. Coding is about thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems.

On very rare occasion.

The rest of the time it's tapping out boring and obvious solutions to depressingly uninteresting problems.

Salt in the wound: The longer you're at it, you'll find that more problems that once would have been interesting are simple and terrifyingly dull.

My advice? Switch fields as early as you can, write code as a hobby. You'll want to kill yourself after a few years otherwise.

Re:Good for you!

[Oligonicella]

Poor baby (I'm 64). Just last year I wrote an English->language translator. The five languages were those I developed for my story series. I needed consistency and doing it by hand was virtually impossible, time-wise. I found that doing it programmaticly was fun, intellectually stimulating and downright easy, both mentally and physically. It also included turning the Romanized language into a custom cursive with tonal indication, floating letter attachments indicating hierarchial nuances and simply looked good. Explain how that would be boring and tedious.

By the way, I have arthritis in my knees, back and hands. Typing is easy if and only if you have learned blind typing. If you have to hunt and peck, sure it's tedious. But that's your shortcoming, not typing per se.

Oh, pardon, I just noticed you're AC (bad eyes). Troll.

Re:Good for you!

[Green Light]

How sad for you! I'm 50+, and still find coding to be "thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems"

Re:Good for you!

[Lumpy]

Give him a break. He codes in Visual Basic and C#

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

So tell me, where is all this elegant software?

Waiting for some old guy to fix all those "elegant" solutions.

Re:Good for you!

[lattyware]

Try using Python - it's about as close to writing down what you mean, rather than telling the computer what to do, that we have.

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

In general, the more elegant a solution, the more rigid it is. Coding is more like engineering, whereyou have to come up with solutions that are robust and can be further costumised if need to be.

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing that you're posting here using your full real name, Oligonicella. Otherwise, we'd have to think that you're using a pseudonym, and thus posting anonymously, like some sort of a coward.

Re:Good for you!

[LulzAndOrder]

he didn't say it was easy, or that the required skill-set was prevalent in the population.

Re:Good for you!

[gbjbaanb]

Its' just a tool to solve some other problem I have. I can't wait for the day when I can tell the computer verbally or draw a picture the algorithm and never ever have to type another line of code - ever.

well, the good news is that you can do this today, it's been around for at least ten years. Its called UML. what happens in your fantasy is that you draw your code layouts in boxes with various types of lines to link the objects together, then click a button and the whole thing gets generated into your favourite language. you then fill in a few of the details (ie the implementation inside some of those objects) and you're done.

I also wrote a system that did something similar - you wrote objects that could be dropped onto a canvas designer like a flowchart and wire up inputs and outputs (yes, a lot like biztalk, only we did it before biztalk came out, though I guess taking our product to MS for performance testing in their labs was a mistake).

Ok, you can stop reading here, the rest of us... I think everyone knows the problems with UML - write the big diagram, put it somewhere for management to look at, then ignore it as you work on code. It simply wasn't expressive enough to use for real work.
As for our product, it worked quite well, you could drop GUI components (html-based) onto it too and it would all magically make an application the user worked through and a business analyst could update when business requirements changed. Trouble was, the complexity of the thing increased exponentially. An app with a dozen components was easy, once you started work on a real-world app, the complexity meant you needed a couple dozen BAs working on it, It would have been more efficient just handing it to programmers and telling them the initial requirements are that the back-end rules will change.

So I don't think there will ever be a shift away from typing code, although practically every app I've seen in recent years has tried some form of configuration replacement (like .net, where everything you used to write in code is now in .config files, and everything you used to put in config is now hard-coded) or custom rolled ones that implement configurable business logic.

Re:Good for you!

[DuckDodgers]

Nonsense. Python is an excellent language, and its syntax is pretty terse for getting things done. But __init___(self, foo, bar, baz, fuzz) is no more "tell the computer what I mean" than any other modern language.

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

> So I don't think there will ever be a shift away from typing code

Yes, it's not like we could just drag&drop javascript blocks to generate code. That would be just impossible:
http://code.google.com/p/blockly/

Re:Good for you!

[wdef]

You might consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique . It works.

Re:Good for you!

[wdef]

I don't understand. There's plenty of great software around.

Re:Good for you!

[wdef]

Perl has an "English" module (I've never used it):

The English module increases the readability and understanding of Perl code, and it is a big step toward alleviating the boggling effect that raw Perl code sometimes has on new programmers. The English module provides a mapping between Perl's eclectic punctuation (special) variables with an English name corresponding to each one. The regular-expression variables that correspond to the three components of a matched string, for example, are often difficult to remember, even for the experienced Perl programmer.

http://www.brainbell.com/tutors/Perl/Usability_and_Simplicity.htm

Re:Good for you!

[Alex Belits]

well, the good news is that you can do this today, it's been around for at least ten years. Its called UML. what happens in your fantasy is that you draw your code layouts in boxes with various types of lines to link the objects together, then click a button and the whole thing gets generated into your favourite language. you then fill in a few of the details (ie the implementation inside some of those objects) and you're done.

THIS IS WHAT UML TOOLS PROPONENTS REALLY BELIEVE.

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

> --- No, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Windows 8 was built on a old Indian burial ground. - Thud457

Ha ha. Also, your id# is about the only one I've seen that actually gives you the right to post in this thread.

And yeah, I'm still coding at 50. Like I can still breathe and stand on my own. Seriously, I've never met anyone who is even close to being able to do my job. I'm better at my job now, after 30 years of experience, than I was after only 25 years.

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't code at all moron. Why? You're too stupid. Everyone on this forums knows you're just a stooge Lumpy.

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think coding and programming are the same thing, you aren't qualified to do either.

Re:Good for you!

[GrantRobertson]

I think what you meant to say was "elegant code." You can have very elegant code that very efficiently does Thing X. But that doesn't matter one whit if the users expect the software to do Thing Q. Or if it takes five clicks to get to Thing X and the user has to do that a hundred times a day.

Re:Good for you!

[gnasher719]

How sad for you! I'm 50+, and still find coding to be "thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems"

Just saying... There was this guy named George Marsaglia. Occassionally posting on comp.lang.c and elsewhere with new algorithms for generating random numbers with a period of 10^45000 or so (ten to the fortyfifththousandth power). Then no posts for a bit, then someone posted he died aged 86.

I can only hope to be fit enough at 86 to come up with elegant solutions to interesting problems.

Re:Good for you!

[Oligonicella]

Difference is, that moniker has a history of posting here that can be traced back and read by anyone. An AC cannot. Whilst it is not my actual name, it's not friggin' AC. You take exception to that? Tough shit. And yes, I shall continue to be snide and smarmy to ACs boasting about themselves. Ten thousand people post AC and typing three letters at the bottom does nothing.

Re:Good for you!

[chrismcb]

As for me at 48, sitting in front of the computer all day just pains me - literally.

Then don't. Stand there, many people find a standing desk works better for them.

It also pains me intellectually and emotionally - it's boring.

Oh, wait, I thought you were a programmer (cause you know, the topic was about programmers)

Re:Good for you!

[CodeBuster]

I like coding, as long as what I'm writing is solving an interesting problem.

Not every problem worth paying for a solution is interesting. That's life in our business.

Re:Good for you!

[CodeBuster]

You're both missing the essential matter. The people who pay the bills don't want to wait for the elegant solution when they can have the good enough solution yesterday. We know that there are better ways to solve problems, but the bean counters put the kabosh on that because they view elegant code solutions, which do the same jobs as the good enough solutions, as wastes of time and money. The worst part about it is that from a business standpoint, they're often right.

Re:Good for you!

[Green Light]

Hmmmmm... Who said that my "done right" solution takes longer or costs more than the newbee's "good enough" one?

Re:Good for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

UML for whole program implementation does not cut because that's not realistic. Simple as that.

I think programming is basically a method for describing the problem detailed enough for a computer to solve. If you think about that for a second, you'll soon realize that it does not make any sense to start drawing a diagram unless is accompanied with a huge amount of text or some else medium with enough expression power.

Here's an problem: teach a 10 year old to fill in a tax reduction form. Would you rather (a) speak instructions to him, (b) give written instructions or (c) draw a diagram with a mouse? For even more complex problems, (b) wins every time. Anybody that claims that (c) will win in the long run and we just need better drawing tools does not even understand the problem.

Re:Good for you!

[angel'o'sphere]

Or SmallTalk ... less syntax that gets into the way.

Hell, I'd love to code now

[NotSoHeavyD3]

But with all the requests I get for tech support(including how do set up this 3rd party USB device) because we don't have a help desk, requests for installation support since we don't have any release engineers, and meetings on top of this I'm lucky to do 2 hours of coding a day.(Suffice it to say I never get into the zone, did I mention I'm a software engineer?)

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[DaMattster]

I'm 35 and I'd love to code now!

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[gbjbaanb]

tech support! I used to dream of tech support interruptions!

Now I'm doing a bastard child of agile that the company has brought in and I cannot do anything for longer than 2 hours without having to go back to the scrum board for more work. Don't they know they can just point me at a problem and I'll get it solved - it is what I've been doing for several decades after all.

I guess the agile stuff is for the kids who can't concentrate on a task for longer than an hour and have to keep being told what to do or they'll just start looking at facebook and twitter all day.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[Anonymous Coward]

> I guess the agile stuff is for the kids who can't concentrate on a task for longer than an hour

Majority of the programmers suck. Agile methods usually provide pretty good methods to spot the problems early, compared to the old water wall, where problems are revealed only at the end.

But you have missed the point of agile. Agile is not about 2 hour tasks on board, agile is anything that works for the best. YOU can decide the rules with your teams. You can try something and if that doesn't work, you can go back to the old or try something else. You should use the default rules only at the start so you understand the point and become able to make smart adjustments to your daily work. Instead of keep doing the work like it has always been done.

So yes, agile allows you not to split the problem into 2 hour tasks. But you obviously need to be pretty good programmer in order for that to be more efficient. So don't dream about that with anything below 10 years of experience.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[Clubbah]

There were/are other methodologies other than waterfall before agile. Cinnibun was very efficient. It was waterfall broken into smaller pieces and adjusted at every interval, which is pretty much a sprint. No one really implements a true waterfall, it was borrowed from construction company management and quickly morphed into other methodologies when people realized that users couldn't conceptualize an entire system up front. Waterfall is really a baseline to compare other methologies to.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[hemp]

Agile is for people that can't put together project plans.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[jfanning]

I hate to break it to you, but that isn't agile.

You, as a team, should be planning the tasks and working on them together. You disappearing for two months to "solve" all the problems yourself is the problem.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[gbjbaanb]

No, we do as a team get together to plan, but we do far too much of it That means that planning, not doing, is what we're spending all our time doing. Our agile processes are bolloxed up.

the concept of disappearing for 2 months to solve a problem is actually pure agile. It may not work for you, and it may not work for your organisation in which case it's not the process you want (agile doesn't mean - follow this exact process or else).

Alistair Cockburn (one of the original agile movement people) has this to say about agile:

One member in the Crystal family of methodologies is Crystal Clear. Crystal Clear can be described to a Level 3 listener in the following words:

        "Put 4-6 people in a room with workstations and whiteboards and access to the users. Have them deliver running, tested software to the users every one or two months, and otherwise leave them alone."

That is agile. Really. The fact that agile can be other things doesn't detract from it. sure, you might not be able to do that, or you might not want to do that.. but it is still agile.

One thing that is definitely not agile is getting bogged down in processes. Agile is all about freeing yourself from the processes that prevent you from delivering what you're supposed to be working on. Planning, documentation (unless it's required by the business need), specifications, test plans, meetings, all of these things are overhead - you might need them, you might need to do them to some extent. But you must recognise that they are not what you're supposed to be doing and as such should be minimised.

Too often the planning and meetings take precedence over delivery. That's exactly what agile was developed to overcome. Take a look at the agile manifesto.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[drew_eckhardt]

tech support! I used to dream of tech support interruptions!

Now I'm doing a bastard child of agile that the company has brought in and I cannot do anything for longer than 2 hours without having to go back to the scrum board for more work. Don't they know they can just point me at a problem and I'll get it solved - it is what I've been doing for several decades after all.

I guess the agile stuff is for the kids who can't concentrate on a task for longer than an hour and have to keep being told what to do or they'll just start looking at facebook and twitter all day.

You need a better job. You may be able to change what's going on there (after a CEO change I got a 2 hour scrum reduced to a brief meeting every-other day with most updates happening electronically via Agilo for trac) to make it tolerable. That may be impossible or exceed your patience in which case you need a different employer.

Agile is awesome especially test driven development.

It's like when you where metaphorically young, made some trivial program not many orders of magnitude more complex than "hello world," ran it, saw everything worked, and were happy except it applies to non-trivial problems like replicated storage that still smells like a single copy of data.

Writing a test, making a change (which can be entirely non-trivial), knowing whether it works within 30 seconds, and being able to iterate until it does over minutes or an afternoon is far more pleasant than making months worth of changes which cursory experiments suggest work, dumping the pile on your QA organization, getting feedback that something's broken, making a change, getting feedback that something else is broken a day or two later, making a change, etc. as the release date slips.

Agile is great for business especially in startup environments where you need to get customers before running out of money and release cycles measured in hours are more conducive to that than ones taking six months.

Burn-down lists and velocity measurement are great for engineering and business. While engineers are good at estimating the size of things they're bad at mapping that to wall clock time in real world environments where tactical (customer support issues) and environmental (your open floorplan is too noisy for people to think 9am - 5pm) issues exist beyond their control. With feeedback on velocity you can come up with more realistic numbers for release dates so there's less stress for everyone involved and a better idea of what you can fit into releases on some periodic schedule so customers don't suffer as the release date and/or quality slip.

Micro-managing and calling it "agile" is bad for both engineers and profits.

Scrum is bad because you loose productivity when you force human context switches for daily meetings. Where you make the meeting early to avoid that engineers stop working exactly eight hours after the meeting start so they're not too tired the next day even though that may mean hours to get back to where they were instead of minutes to finish. If they do stay late to get something done they come to the mandatory meeting tired and the quality of their work is as bad as if they were drunk.

Scrum is even worse when mis-applied. People can and do turn the daily meetings into 1-2 hour affairs totaling 50-100 man-hours a week for a team of 10 people which can be $200 - $500K/year in fully burdened costs when you have senior people in high-wage areas.

Some managers like to use one burn-down list for the entire organization where
engineers are fungible commodities that do whatever is the highest priority regardless of scope and how far along they are in their career. That's a huge waste of money (in large technology companies some one with 15-20 years of experience doing meaty things can have a compensation package twice the size of some one with 1/10th that experience), reduces quality, and robs people of their self-actualization.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[gbjbaanb]

I'm not convinced by TDD though, I do it but I've never really needed it in all the years of coding I've been doing. I prefer to write up test harnesses that exercise more of the system in a larger granularity. ie, instead of writing tests that exercise a method, I prefer to exercise a class - and then the test I write can be an example of how to use that class if it involves setting up, configuring it to whatever task you want, and then making it do work.

I also find this helps find more bugs than traditional TDD, eg the time I had a network class that had methods to set ip address and port, but if you set the port first, it would fail (as setting ip would first initialise the entire internal address variables). TDD doesn't find those bugs, and they're the ones I'm more interested in.

Scrum is really bad... I wish we were doing scrum,. instead we're doing DSDM (yes, you'll have to look it up). Its worse than scrum as it tries to fit a defined timescale to agile processes. So instead of prioritising and working until you've done as much as you can get done, you have to continually worry about whether you can get all you've agreed to done in time. Still, our stand-ups are too long, and our stories are either too small or too large, and some of the team don't want to apply tasks to them. So we don't have accurate burndowns either!

They'll get it eventually though, or management will enforce it to the book (and the expensive consultancy that was brought in to teach everyone this crap.....)

Its what it is though, I'll stick with it until I really get fed up, you can't just dump something without trying to change it.

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[Anonymous Coward]

I really do wonder what has changed over the years and what is just the new dominant mythology. I work in a company with plenty of old coders. I'm in my 60's and some have worked until 70. Most of the staff has worked through decades of management incompetence and are regarded as essential to maintain a large antiquated spaghetti codebase that mixes obscure and undocumented business rules with obscure and undocumented antiquated technology. Now they want us to be more agile, which management thinks means faster, faster, faster as they get off urging us on. They think that we will benefit from a change to an openscape environment, so we can all get instant access to interrupt each other whenever we need help, and simultaneously work and get cross-trained by soaking up the ambient noise of innumerable conversations here and there.

They say that some companies actually have strong evidence that this really works, but I wonder if it's an age thing, and I expect that it will fail for those of us who grew up before MTV. Not only do we have attention spans, our brains do slow down with age. Years ago, the Peopleware book said that private offices doubled productivity, but now the opposite is the fashionable prescription.

I'll recommend that if you want to survive a while as a geezer coder, you should work at keeping the brain young. Read, do not skim. The tendency to rely on the big picture, not details, becomes overly strong as our years actually give us a big picture. Parse every sentence carefully when you read. Take some of the free online classes that will challenge your brain, and work hard at the details of the lectures and assignments. Within a very short time you will probably notice some positive changes in yourself. This has helped me. For more ideas, look at the findings and training techniques that are coming out of UCSF.

Anyone else have telling observations about what happens when age meets agility?

Re:Hell, I'd love to code now

[Anonymous Coward]

So about 98% of the world that produces software?

Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[grcumb]

Asking whether geeks should still be coding at fifty is like asking if people should still be having sex at fifty. The answer is stupidly obvious. OF COURSE we'll still be coding at fifty! It may seem revolting to younger folks, and lord knows it does take a little longer to get going. But once we've hit that groove, baby, we're not done in 30 seconds. No, we work that algorithm, and we know how to do it, too. None of those stupid mistakes we made during the frenzied, sweaty all-night coding sessions of our youth, blindly swapping pointers and hoping to avoid another premature segfault. Oh, no. And none of that I'm-too-hot-for-you arrogance, either. We leave our customers satisfied, because - take my word for it - that's the only way they're coming back for more.

... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....

*SOB*

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Joce640k]

... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....

Boy, are YOU doing it wrong....

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[GigaBurglar]

So true - Fuck personality. If you're a 50 year old doctor you will live alone.. If you're a 50 year old physicist you will live alone.. If you're anything but a red convertible driving buffed up football watching meat-head who can't let go of his twenties - you will live alone. The fact of the matter is - programmers don't usually fight over the telly remote and have a capacity to learn and understand - but fuck that because you will live alone. It's not programmers that scare women off - it's socially awkward nerds. God I am DOOMED.

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Kupfernigk]

So - marry one. Plenty of women are socially awkward nerds, and the Internet means it is now possible to meet them. Mind you, as a socially awkward nerd married to a woman who does all the social stuff for both of us and likes to have someone dependable who ensures that all the infrastructure just works and brings in good money - I recommend this too.

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[ByteSlicer]

... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....

Boy, are YOU doing it wrong....

Yes, someone needs to introduce him in the field of advanced robotics.
My FemBot3000 will be finished any moment now!

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Leaving all social arrangement to the wife (a role women fall into very easily) is very dangerous. If she leaves, you're alone with little or no social support. Happened to me. Bad. I'll never depend on a woman again like that.

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn dude, calm down. And don't read this as though I'm trying to be condescending or abrasive, I'm not:

You remember how you spent X hours learning to write computer code? How it was awkward at first and you had to keep flipping through the documentation to remember whatever it was that slipped your brain? How you gradually memorized the relevant library functions and as you become more confident working with your first or second or Nth language, built an intuition for how to approach common problems with the appropriate patterns? Maybe you got shot down a few times when your first publicly posted code snippets got flamed to shit by some newsgroup veteran with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge and a bitter streak?

I'm not talking about programming here. Sure, there are nerds with legitimate social anxiety disorders and my heart goes out to them, but it's not by coincidence that they call them social skills. You gotta work on them. And like with writing code, some take to it more quickly than others, but frankly you're gonna crash a few times. It happens. And in both cases, like you've noted, personality really has its limits - but don't let that personality overwhelm you and conclude "I'm DOOMED": where would you be if the first hundred times your code blew up or failed to compile, you said "welp, that it's it, I'll never write a good computer program in my life"?

I know I'm sounding a bit Dr. Phil here, but though you have to want this, it's not enough. You do have to work for it.

And "red convertible driving buffed up football watching meat-head"? Really? I've been in your shoes, believe me I've spent many a night spitting misogynistic acid, but consider what you're placing in a negative light here: men who are in shape, successful, and enjoy participating at least tangentially in one of the most socially prevalent pastimes of our culture. Damn! What woman would want THAT? Like it or not, we mediate ourselves largely through social sign systems, and whether or not you can dance the culture-dance is indeed a big part of whether or not you end up living alone. There's nothing sinister about that. Nobody's trying to get you down except you.

We are not entitled to mates who worship us for being unique and pretty snowflakes. You gotta meet people at the middle. Social systems can be just as fascinating as a complicated graph problem. Have the intellectual courage to dive in.

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

So true. It's hard to believe that a geek could reach 50 without figuring out that there are plenty of women who will think you're the greatest, bang your brains out, and not drive you crazy, all at that same time.

All that's required is that you hand over a stack of $100 bills, first.

Since I figured that out, all those desirable girls and women we've known and wanted since we were 12 years old, the ones who plead sincerely that they "just want a nice guy who'll treat me with the respect and romance I deserve" (and are, as we've all figured out by now, lying their asses off,) don't bother me so much. They can be ignored and replaced.

A poster below says it's possible to use the internet to meet socially awkward nerd women. Good for him and good for all you young nerdy guys. Maybe life will be easier for you. I, however, am old enough that the (ubiquitous, affordable) internet didn't exist until I was past my prime. Thus, I avail myself of a very old-fashioned alternative and, frankly, I know I get more and better sexual and social intercourse than a non-insignificant fraction of married folks.

You find your own path in this life, I suppose. Good luck, young nerds.

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[paramour]

... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....

Boy, are YOU doing it wrong....

The coding or the sex?

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....

*SOB*

Whenever someone utters something like this I feel the need to point out that Linus Torvalds (42) is married, and have three children (and his wife is a real life ninja, six time finnish national karate champion). When you get past 20 you will see that the smart guys actully are quite attractive to women wanting a family.

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the 'there are introverted nerdy women, so it's okay for introverted nerdy men' idea is that it implicitly assumes introverted nerdy women will be interested in introverted nerdy men. The harsh reality is that they have just as little interest in introverted nerdy men (and just as much interest in rich arrogant hunks) as any other woman. This is a problem that the Internet cannot really solve.

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[antdude]

I agree. I am almost 40 and still a virgin geek/nerd! :P

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[boudie2]

Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....

*SOB*

Whenever someone utters something like this I feel the need to point out that Linus Torvalds (42) is married, and have three children (and his wife is a real life ninja, six time finnish national karate champion). When you get past 20 you will see that the smart guys actully are quite attractive to women wanting a family.

And smart guys are especially quite attractive when they are 42 years old and have a net worth of $150 million (as Linus Torvald has; I googled his net worth).

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious :)

Re:Coding at 50? Why even ask?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....

*SOB*

Find good sex workers (middle-to-high end studio or callgirl only, no street walkers). You can afford high quality commercial pussy now that would not look out of place on a catwalk or in the movies. Those girls can cost. Still, ironic that now is not when you most desperately needed but could not afford them, which was years ago, from puberty (or before puberty in my case!) onwards to about 45.

One problem is that, despite the hype, Viagra does not work 100% for everyone. Another is that even if you solve an erection problem and can still ejaculate an ocean, libido (sexual attraction) is down for most men in their 50s as compared to that of young men. From one published study: achieving erection takes longer and is no longer instantaneous. Morning erections on waking become less frequent (rare in my case). Penile sensitivity is decreased (I can feel that), the strength of erections is decreased, the length of that gorgeous wonderful period of inevitability (where proceeding to ejaculation is irreversible) is decreased (by a lot in my case), as is the amount of extra-pelvic muscle spasms during orgasm and the intensity of orgasm. You can still have a great orgasm at 55, but at 19 years old nearly *every* single ejaculation was simply mind-blowingly, world-changingly huge for me. A cosmic event of epic proportions.

Decreased libido can be treated. Testosterone drops by about 10% every 10 years post-30yo (iirc) and low testosterone is one cause of loss of libido. But a problem is that the ranges of "normal" testosterone levels in men vary so wildly that doctors disagree as to what level should be considered normal at what age. Considering that testosterone replacement therapy may be linked with an increased incidence of a certain type of cancer, and that they don't really know if that allegedly normal testosterone result in the bloodwork is actually normal *for you*, doctors have to weight the pros and cons of testosterone replacement and the negative stereotype that men in their 50s shouldn't need much sex anyway.

Smoking some cannabis has always made me horny very quickly and is a good sex aid but the down side is that chronic cannabis abuse (which I also do lots lately) seems to have the reputation of actually causing impotence and loss of desire. So there's a balance to achieve there. Problems with erections is sometimes an early warning sign for heart disease.

Vigorous exercise (eg gym) improves my erections and libido, so that needs to displace smoking dope. A good diet with all the right things helps too. Ie as they say, attend to your general health.

most coders are too inexperienced

[korpique]

Many people move on from programming to management or entirely other careers because it is so hard. What makes most existing systems hard to develop is the unnecessary complexity, lack of or overabstraction and negligence of test code. Management coming from such mess and never seeing anything better can not strive for anything better. It is hard to navigate such an enviroment and stay sane and become productive. Once you succeed it is highly rewarding to coach younger team members. I'm living proof of that and there are plenty more at least in the Finnish agile circles. Career age would be of essence to anyone looking for real successful team leads.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[petes_PoV]

I wouldn't say coding is hard. However, it does require a certain level of mental discipline and the ability to organise one's thoughts. The problem with older coders is that they tend to just get the job done. Quietly, without fuss or drama. (At least, I do) Whereas the young 'uns make a big deal about working late, pulling all-nighters ('cos they're on FB all day) and turning a project into a crisis. That means they get all the attention and the spotlight, which makes them look like superheros when they squeak in with a clean compile just milliseconds before the delivery deadline.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[mattpalmer1086]

There seems to be some truth to this, in my own experience. I find the solutions my younger colleagues invent are just too complicated and gnarly. They haven't yet found how to see the underlying simplicity in the problem and solution - and more importantly, they don't even understand that they should be doing that.

Mentoring is very satisfying, particularly when someone has a "got-it" moment, and their code improves forever thereafter. But I find that is rare. Many people I've worked with - even really, really bright people - just aren't interested in seeing a bigger picture. In fact, I'd go further. Most people will never do this - they will just solve the problem immediately in front of them, without any regard for how the whole thing hangs together, or the semantics of their construction, or the future ease of maintenance of their code.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure it's really about inexperience, or hardness of career. It's the difference between being a journeyman or a master, and very few it seems have a genuine desire of mastery in what they do.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[Velex]

This is my strategy. I tell my employer: "Do you want to pay me overtime or do you want the account to slip its deadline? Your choice." If that's drama, get your head out of your ass. If you're not paid by the hour to code, you're doing it wrong. I keep hoping my employer will answer "yes, we'll pay overtime" but they never do.

What, is that somehow unfair. Well too fucking bad. My time is worth money.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[der_joachim]

I wouldn't say coding is hard.

Coding is not hard. Being the one to do the grunt work is. You'll always be on the bottom of the corporate ladder and in the middle of the shit storm, regardless of skill and experience. You can either stop caring or switch careers. At 36, I am still in doubt which one it will be.

Another thing making it hard to be a (non-freelance) coder, is that most of the time is spent on either trivial stuff or uninteresting problems. I know several coders who would love to work in innovative projects, but are forced to do something spirit crushingly boring like generating excel sheets from a software package from 1997 or something.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[gbjbaanb]

I'd agree totally with that, but I also blame the languages we use - there's often been a discussion concerning whether the "easy to use" languages and their "handholding" IDEs are corrupting the youth by making them turn coding into an exercise in snippets, or cut&paste, or click and its filled out for you.

Its no longer a problem to solve, its a problem that has 1 solution that you have to find. Coding might have turned from a puzzle game where you have to think of how it all fits together, into an adventure game where you have to discover the right words to progress to the next level.

Frameworks in particular are a problem here, as you never know what's happening under the hood so you're discouraged from finding out, instead you have to just know how to work the system.

There a few things like this that have a knock-on effect to the rest of the work we do, and the interest in it.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[Anonymous Coward]

I moved on from programming to management because I'm a problem solver, and the problems weren't in my code but the idiots in management.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[mattpalmer1086]

I have to say, I'm not one of those who think that making programming easier is making programming worse.

I've been programming for over 30 years (first experience being with hex keypads, teletype terminals and batch processing systems back in the 70s!). I love refactoring support, debugging, in-line help, static analysis, code navigation and folding, documentation generation, etc. They make me much, much, more productive. Anyone who thinks using a text editor, command line or punch-cards is superior is welcome to them, but in my opinion they're crazy!

There may be people for whom all this handholding allows them to write poor software, when they couldn't have done it at all without that level of support. It may also be the case that it allows unmotivated developers to plateau in their abilities too early - although if they're that unmotivated I'm not sure how good they would ever have been.

I'm kind of with you on frameworks though, particularly in Java land. I tend to find that frameworks get me 70% of the way with about 30% of the effort. Win! The next 20% takes me 60% of the effort, just breaking even as I struggle to make it do what I need. Wrestling with incomplete documentation, lesser used functionality and mysterious error messages for which a single plaintive post can be found in the blogosphere somewhere, to which there are no replies ;)

I often wish I'd just ignored the entire framework and built the damn thing myself. But maybe I'm not building typical systems, or something. I guess if you're doing bread-and-butter work where lots of other people are doing essentially the same thing, they may work out better.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[wdef]

I wouldn't say coding is hard.

That depends on what you're coding.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[ahabswhale]

I don't think "hard" is the right word but it more like "Coding is a pain in the ass". It's not the coding in and of itself that makes it so, it's the dealing with a legacy environment and integrating with less than well designed systems that makes things difficult and frustrating. If you're, doing greenfield development, then you don't have to worry about that stuff and it's all a bunch of fluffy white clouds but if you work in the environment that most programmers do, there are few fluffy white clouds to look at.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[gbjbaanb]

It is a general, sweeping statement, but I think it has enough truth in it to matter.

Once we have 2 classes of developers - those who were entrusted to the complicated bits that mattered, like the back-end data processing and business logic; and those who wrote the more RAD side of things, the VB and web developers. Now, I know I'm making another sweeping generalisation but you know what I'm talking about - there were poor developers who did crappy work, but it was ok as the work they were entrusted with wasn't critical to the running of the system.

But today, everyone's a back-end developer, only they;ve been given stuff like LINQ and so an ex-VB dev suddenly decides that he can write the back-end DB and doesn't have to know SQL because his ORM abstracts it all away from him so much. You see the answers on stackoverflow where people say that SQL development is dead because of LINQ!

Its just an example, but one that shows why I think the 'easy to code' stuff makes the poorer developers rise to work on the more difficult aspects of the system.

now, I like the IDEs, though I'm a bit "meh" about refactoring support - the support is limited and I don't tend to "rename variable" very often, if at all. Some of the bits you describe are best left to external tools anyway (eg doc generation as there are better tools out there than that integrated into your IDE, and I always want to put more doc into the docs than is supported by the auto-gen tool).

Frameworks.... should be banned, libraries are the way to go, something that you use. Frameworks are there to use you! I suppose they do have their place in some very well-defined areas, a game engine where you deliver graphics and a few extras, but when you're bastardising your language with attributes just to shoehorn it into a framework's poor extensibility, then you're on to a loser (yes, WCF I'm looking right at you, PHP has a much better webservice system that requires a tenth of the code.. when PHP kicks your arse, you should give up)

but yes, there's a difference between helping me organise my work; and doing so much work for me that anyone with only half a brain can think they can do it.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a couple of things contribute to that.

First, they realized it's better to design it so any section could be understood in a few minutes because of constant interruptions, multi-project maintainability, and to be able to have dinner with family.

Second, when people are younger they have more brain cells. They can brute force an enormous amount of energy into a project, which in many cases wasn't really necessary. Then as they get older and have fewer brain cells, they find ways to reuse the same neural pathways by customizing well known paradigms to unify all their work.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[JosephTX]

Those "young 'uns" take longer because they're new to real-world programming. You were exactly the same, except the software YOU worked with was nowhere near as large as what younger programmers have to familiarize themselves with. And the fact that they have to sift through legacy code written by people as close-minded as you only makes it harder. It takes a special kind of stupid to criticize your kids' peers like that, as though they're expected to have your 30 years' worth of experience right out of college.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[blahplusplus]

"I wouldn't say coding is hard. However, it does require a certain level of mental discipline and the ability to organise one's thoughts."

Most thought is unconscious. See here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[Kittenman]

This is my strategy. I tell my employer: "Do you want to pay me overtime or do you want the account to slip its deadline? Your choice." If that's drama, get your head out of your ass. If you're not paid by the hour to code, you're doing it wrong. I keep hoping my employer will answer "yes, we'll pay overtime" but they never do.

What, is that somehow unfair. Well too fucking bad. My time is worth money.

Well said. I had a boss once who used to complain when his boss asked for extra time at no cost, and he didn't pass anything down to us without compensation.

If managers want something for nothing, tell them to go to a charity.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[mattpalmer1086]

Well, I've spent the majority of my career doing greenfield projects, so I haven't really seen the kind of coding shop you're talking about. I would have (possibly naively) thought that letting really incompetent programmers work on critical systems is more of a management failure rather than the result of better tools.

My personal style uses a lot of refactoring, particularly the names of things in the early stages. I'm not averse to using good tools outside the IDE too, although I generally prefer to integrate them if possible. As far as I'm concerned, if an automatic tool can do something faster and more reliably than I can, then by all means let the tool do it. It frees me up to focus on the more interesting problems. But each to his own...

I do like what you said about frameworks and libraries, particularly "Frameworks are there to use you!" - that made me smile :)

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[gbjbaanb]

there are fewer programmers around than there used to be, maybe because kids today all want to do media studies rather than anything difficult, but it means the pool of talent is smaller. There is also an aspect where the kid who can make more noise about how great product xyz is can appear to be an expert, and persuading management that he is competent isn't something they'd know any different. when faced with a team lead who has no real knowledge either, it can be a killer combination - for incompetence that still looks good. Today, its easy to say "yes but performance always was going to be poor given the complexity of the uber difficult business logic we're using, we'll just have to scale out into the cloud", and you've hit 5 buzzwords which makes you a winner! collect your promotion to architect at the door :)

I do like using lots of tools that are good at what they do, rather than "its integrated so we'll use it".. meaning "we'll give Microsoft even more money for a half-arsed attempt at a product that has way better alternatives". Currently I'm using TFS... jenkins+SVN/git+Redmine would kick its sorry arse, but ... hey, it's integrated in VS so it must be better. pah.

Glad to give you a nice quote though, please use it freely :)

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[Anonymous Coward]

this does not just pertain to coding. my observation is that young people tend to be drama queens while older people tend to be cool and calm because...of experience and the confidence it brings. also, in the past 20-30 years, people have been learning more and more of their 'social coding' from video media that has been growing more and more frantic in pace and tone.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[chrismcb]

Coding is hard. That is why there is so much bad code. Of course coding is easier for some people than others, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard.

Re:most coders are too inexperienced

[Anonymous Coward]

Overtime? What country do *you* live in?

Not Plastic, Infinite

[Anonymous Coward]

Still churning it out at 57 years young, though middle age is getting closer. May call it quits in 15 or 20 years.

age has little to do with it though

[Anonymous Coward]

"What he said" is always how I felt about coding, but in terms of age I have countervaling feelings.

Getting older, I look back at younger me and wonder where I found all that time, and I've also lost the thrill of discovery. I really can't stand looking things up that I've looked up before (if it didn't stick, it's not important, if it's not important, why is it taking me time), and wondering why programming never seems to change, why can't I learn/develop my one favorite brand of syntactic sugar and code in any language just the way I want, and while we're at it, how about semantic sugar, why don't all the semantic paradigms that we like become available in all the languages we like?

coding used to feel like freedom because of all the possibilities, and now it feels like chains because of all the same old hurdles..

I still love the puzzle aspect (and for me it's in n-dimensional space, like hyperrogue or something)

Re:age has little to do with it though

[turgid]

coding used to feel like freedom because of all the possibilities, and now it feels like chains because of all the same old hurdles..

I'm starting to have fun finding cunning ways of working around the hurdles now that I didn't have the experience to make work in the past.

I try to make time to try out my own ideas and to explore away from work. I find it keeps me refreshed and interested.

Does the media have early-onset Alzheimer's?

[bregmata]

What a stupid fucking premise.

Nifty, for sure

[Kjella]

I hope I'm still solving little puzzles like that when I'm 50 but I also solved those when I was 25. There's nothing wrong with that, but if that's all you do then you're probably going to be at the same point career and pay grade-wise at 50 as at 25. If you've become the CEO of SAS, that's probably because you're solving a lot of other issues that you couldn't solve as a 25 year old. If you have experience, you have to find positions where that gives you leverage and not all of them are like that. It doesn't matter if you've been flipping burgers for 30 years and perfected your burger flipping technique, you're still very replaceable by a newbie. If you want to be a coder specialist, make sure it's a specialist job and not just writing your average glue code. It's easy enough for the CEO to say that, he can pick whatever problem he finds complex and interesting to do as a hobby, the actual employees don't have that luxury. Unless you're talking about working on an OSS or pet project outside of work.

Re:Nifty, for sure

[Lumpy]

Problem solving doesnt get better, you take less stupid risks at 50.

20 year old - Server is down? let's try jump starting it with a pair of jumper cables from the other server!

50 year old - Server is down? Fine, I'll go grab the spare from the closet, you get the backup tapes just in case. I told you the spare should be online all the time as a hot failover...

and yes I have jump started a server back to life again. the power supply had failed and could not recover from a power outage. jumping the 12V from another one gave it enough guts to spin up the hard drives and it came back to life to boot up and run. and it was a stupid move. I could have damaged 2 servers, and all I did was encourage corporate to NOT replace the server in a timely manner.

Re:Nifty, for sure

[Gorobei]

I hope I'm still solving little puzzles like that when I'm 50 but I also solved those when I was 25. There's nothing wrong with that, but if that's all you do then you're probably going to be at the same point career and pay grade-wise at 50 as at 25..

Exactly, at 50, you will still be solving those little puzzles, but you're going solve them with 30 seconds thought and 10 lines of code that runs first time: they are just that, little problems that you have encountered a hundred times before.

But, if you want to be at a different career/pay point, you're also going to be solving big puzzles. Many of these are so big that people don't even see them as puzzles until you implement the solution, then man-years of work and confusion just melt away.

The problem, is, of course, that most people never get to a career point that trains them for the big puzzles. A few years of apprenticeship at Google, Facebook, Wall st, Xerox Parc, etc, can be a big help. Being the smartest guy in the room implementing web backends tends not to be a great growth path.

"SAS" Coding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this is a joke post...

That NOT what I said.

[Anonymous Coward]

If coding is like typing for you, you've never done any real programming. Coding is about thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems. I don't think that's boring at all.

If coding is like typing for you, you've never done any real programming.

I said I HATE typing - NOT that programing was like typing! Geeze!

I developed operating systems, dude. I think that would count as "real" programming.

Sometimes I really hate Slashdot!

Re:That NOT what I said.

[Oligonicella]

AC's stating their creds are similar to teenagers listing their conquests - laughably ignorable.

Do you also HATE writing, HATE speaking, HATE singing? Typing is just another form of communication. If you HATE it, you probably don't type well. Learn.


By the way, if your programmatic abilities match your cut and paste abilities..... learn to edit. It's necessary in programming as well.

Re:That NOT what I said.

[kwikrick]

OK, granted, I misread you on purpose, go for the easy mod points.

Still, do you really think talking to your computer, or drawing pictures for it, is going to make programming easier or more fun or less work? I very strongly doubt that. When programming becomes repetitive, you should find some way to automate that part; code it differently, develop a tool or invent a new language. And ultimately, it would be great if some AI would just write programs for our problems. Before that, there will be some typing. But not too much if you do it right.

Re:That NOT what I said.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the time spent on software development is spent on typing to the extent it's a problem or the majority of said time, as opposed to other things involved, you're doing it wrong.

Re:That NOT what I said.

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess you missed this. Here it is again for your reference http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872665

Re:That NOT what I said.

[Smallpond]

Graphical programming has been attempted before. It turns out there's more to programming than just connecting boxes together, although it did find some uses in audio processing and such.

Coding and meditation

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Two great pleasures of life you can still enjoy at 55. Other things, not so much.

My problem at the age of 45 with coding....

[Lumpy]

Switching between languages takes time. Programming Java, then C, then Assembler... It takes me a solid 4 hours to switch between languages if I have to do anything complex. If I have been coding in C for months and then Oh here's a new embedded project we need done in assembler... My brain doesn't have the drivers loaded for assembler and it has to search the tape backup archives for that driver and load it into operating memory.

Then I hit the ground running full speed.

Back in my 20's I was able to switch language sets at random within a moment's notice. In fact I was at one point writing in 3 languages at once. 4GL for the accounting system, C writing printer drivers for that Xenix 386 OS we were running at the office, and assembler for my 68hc11 wyse terminal multiplexer. I figured out how to get 16 text terminals to communicate uber fast speeds over a single pair of dry copper wires from the main store to the second store location. But then I also did not need coffee and drank an epic amount of beer and rum every day...

Re:My problem at the age of 45 with coding....

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the epic beer and rum contributed to your slower context switch speed of late.... Hmm. Not that I'm a fine one to talk as sometimes inebriated coding can be productive. I'm 55 and have been working in numerous startups over the past few years with the 20 something CEO and crew. Just have to keep learning new skills as you go and it doen't get stale for me.

Re:My problem at the age of 45 with coding....

[Nerdfest]

... but the code your wrote; more maintainable now, or then? That's really the important part of software development in most cases. I used to aim for code that ran as fast as possible, and was frequently so complex I had trouble debugging it myself. Now I aim for "fast enough", generally error free, but maintainable by someone with far less skill. When you know a language well, you can write beautiful poetry.

Re:My problem at the age of 45 with coding....

[gregor-e]

My code is much more maintainable now. If there's a choice between a sexy, haha-see-if-you-can-figure-this-out way or a bread-n-butter way of doing it, I generally go for the bread-n-butter way now. I still indulge in a little Perl golf from time to time, but never anything bigger than a few lines of easily replaceable functionality.

Re:My problem at the age of 45 with coding....

[ahabswhale]

I completely agree with this. I'm 47 and my code is far more maintainable and understandable to others than what I did earlier in my career. However, it's less clever. I've also learned that the aesthetics matter a lot more than most people would think.

Re:My problem at the age of 45 with coding....

[Anonymous Coward]

I work on projects that tie together Javascript/Html5, C++, and assembly language, as well as custom built circuits boards and robotics - all components of the same project, as well as many other projects using these technologies. I'm mid 40s. No problem using the tools I know so well. But I'm really in no need of new languages, except if I get into FPGAs. YMMV.

My only concerns are the physical limitations of my current preferred output devices, aka my hands, including the associated elbows and shoulders. Eyesight could also become a limiting factor. I know a programmer who uses voice input, and I've set up voice recognition systems before, so that may be the way I'll be coding when I'm in my 80s.

Coding is great, but usually work gets in the way

[JohnnyDoesLinux]

Second start-up, the issue is that the other hats you have to wear constantly code-block.

Coding is like constantly solving puzzles, that is why after playing suduko, I was more interested in writing a solver than doing the puzzles.

As far as the "nerd and sex" correlation goes: Marry a nerd (she hides it well). 30+ years seems to be doing just fine

Starting at 12

[Anonymous Coward]

My son is 12 . Any thoughts on how he should get started.

Re:Starting at 12

[Anonymous Coward]

I started with basic and wrote a pacman clone (without any walls). I would recommend him to start with Java and do the same. I would pick Java, because it includes the graphic libraries and thus makes game programming a lot easier. Not to mention e.g. Eclipse and other tools that work nicely in Java. And it is also cross platform.

Re:Starting at 12

[cheesybagel]

I would try Python with PyGame probably.

Hiring a 50-year old...

[seven of five]

The flip side of that is, who'll hire a 50-year old coder, or even keep him or her on the damn payroll? Even at reduced wages it's a crap shoot.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[Simon Brooke]

The flip side of that is, who'll hire a 50-year old coder, or even keep him or her on the damn payroll? Even at reduced wages it's a crap shoot.

I don't have any problems getting hired. I keep myself up to date with what's current, and I have thirty years experience so I know what not to do; and so I can produce higher quality code faster than people half my age. I can't work as long hours as I used to - I can't hold concentration for seventeen hour days any more; and I value my free time more. But I'm good, and I'm productive, and I'm never short of work.

If you get worse at your craft as you grow older, you're doing something wrong.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any problems getting hired either. I'm on the wrong side of 59 now and am earing more than ever.
I'm also enjoying my current gig more than any I've had over the past 15+ years.
I write code but there is far more to being a competent developer than simply writing code. I estimate that over a 6 minth period only about 20% of my time is writing code. 30% testing and the rest split between documentation, end user training and writing specs for the next project.

People hire the likes of me for my experience (and for calling a spade a spade and not a garden implement). My boss appreciates my honesty.
I've been there, done than, got the 'T' shirt several times over.

and I get head hunters callng me up every month. Sadly most want me to do 'management stuff'. I'm not a manager and never will be.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in my 50's, and rarely have had much of a problem finding a job. My current gig I was hired into when I was 51. I refuse to go into management and still sling code most days. I had a four month spell once where I was jobless, but that's been the worst of it my whole career. Though honestly, I worry a fair amount about my _next_ job. Not that I'm afraid of losing my current one, but I realize that it does get harder to get hired the older you are. I'm hoping (and working hard to make happen) that my current gig lasts me until retirement (read: until I stroke out or die of heart disease :-\ )

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[rundgong]

It's only a crap shoot if you suck at hiring people.

But then obviously it is going to be a crap shoot no matter what age they are...

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[Old time hacker]

As a fifty+ year old coder/designer/architect, I just went back to do another startup where I get to write code again and to mentor the rest of the team. The reason to write code is that I want to build something and have it used by customers (preferably paying ones). I can have the biggest impact in a small startup where we want to change the world (or at least a small, profitable, segment of it!)

At 50+, your priorities do change somewhat -- family and kids are more important -- but these all encourage you to work smarter rather than longer. You also gain (through experience) an intuitive feel for what will work, and what will not.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[hughbar]

Nope, I'm 62, there have been a lot of threads about this recently [or maybe I'm reading the same thread time and again? nooooo] and I get quite a lot of work. I'm contract and I've never been that interested in salaried work. As I'm mainly a Perl person who works on large codebases, I'm in a good legacy niche.

But I keep up with stuff, svn and now git, Ruby as it's related to Perl, Erlang because it's interesting, PHP because half the open-source-web is coded in it [ugh], not-Java though I could probably make money out of it. As many people have posted, I've been doing all this for about 36-odd years and I like it, how lucky is that?

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The flip side of that is, who'll hire a 50-year old coder, or even keep him or her on the damn payroll?"

Huh? Its the 20-30's somethings that switch jobs every few months as that try to find that better job. 49+ coders are more likely to stick around, and be focused on there job, and not be checking FB every 5 minutes. Why take a risk on a 20-30 something?

Also now (See Zerohedge) that Only the +49 somethings are getting jobs, all of the other age groups are either losing employment or having trouble finding another job.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got you beat buddy, I'm 67.I do consulting mainly in C++ and C# with occasional use of Java and Python. I've been programming since 1966! when it was Fortran and assembler and memory dump debugging. I've worked for big companies, small companies, had my own business fail, had another succeed and bought out. Tried to stop for a while, got bored. I've consulted for over twenty years and right now the market is hot for my services. I'll probably die at my console.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[chrismcb]

Even at reduced wages it's a crap shoot.

What is that supposed to mean?
You hire and retain a 50 year old, presumably because that person has a lot of experience. Experience helps.
If you feel that hiring a 50 year old is a crap shoot, how do you feel hiring a 25 year old is?

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know someone, a consultant, who is in his mid-60s. He does embedded stuff in C and assembly. He came of age programming embedded processors where every byte counted, and you had to find very efficient ways of doing things.
He's got plenty of business - there are still a lot of applications with sub-$1 processors where experience in this area counts.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[gsslay]

One thing about a mature coder is that they know the value of good documentation. They know this because they have 30+ years of coding experience cluttering their brain and know if they don't document something properly they will not remember it in 6 months time. When you're 20 you remember it, simply because you've never done anything like it before in your life and have an otherwise empty head.

A mature coder also knows the value of documentation on 15 year old code, because they've got 15 year old code in their own portfolio. A youngster thinks 15 years old code ago is prehistoric, must be written in roman numerals, and not worth even attempting to understand.

So if you want quick and dirty, and be totally reliant on the admittedly more agile mind of a 20 year old remembering how it works, hire the young gun. But if you want tidy code and clear documentation; go with the aged programmer.

Re:Hiring a 50-year old...

[hughbar]

Well done, I'm carrying on too, as someone said, it's like an interesting puzzle. Yes, I probably wrote a Fortran program to calculate pi in 1966 when at school, we took it to a mainframe at a steel mill to run it. 50 years old, just youngsters, bah!

I've done management and all that stuff...

[Simon Brooke]

... and I've gone back to coding. I'm good at it and I know I'm good at it. I'm only 56 now, but I expect to be still coding for a living when I'm 70.

Re:I've done management and all that stuff...

[Argon]

Been there done that too. I am 40 and don't plan on getting back to management.

Re:I've done management and all that stuff...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 30 and looking for a different carreer.

In my carreer I've so far done consultancy (advertizement, automation, marketting, finance,...) and then decided to make a carreer inside a single company where I've done mobile development (Android) and progressed to take IPhone development onto my resumé. Once personal life got more important (long hours, working through holidays to get "chrismass releases" out and what not) I went into financial programming.

For me, it becomes harder and harder to "keep up" and put in the same energy studying new technologies or particularities; Problems which are solved into IDE-specific solutions, which we coded around for years anyhow. Where you need to learn all the specifics, until you come into implementing and bumping on the limitations or lack of foresight. After which you end up bugging support, publishing feature-requests.... Yet your project keeps stalling because the "best latest thing" was the most sexy one and sold well.

Yet it's what I'm good at it and I know the industry, have my connections and can now enjoy a respectable wage. But with all the administrative hoops you have to dance through in the form of what management desires - and the crisis years where the ideas of "managing developers" was not a very pleasant nor respectful experience.

I wouldn't mind a carreer where I stop staring in the light-box. Or can stop to make the pixels dance.

It's ME!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am just like this guy! -- but without the money...

Re:It's ME!!

[metaforest]

Yeah b/c you are an Anonymous Coward.

Sorry, no

[Kupfernigk]

I am over 60 and I disagree. A lot depends on how you lived in your twenties and thirties. If you have stayed fit all your life, maintained correct weight, avoided alcohol, tobacco, conspicuous consumption (and possibly firearms), your fifties and sixties is when you suddenly reap the benefits as you now have the money to do things and the kids have grown up,

Re:Sorry, no

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I actually did all that and I reaped plenty of um, err....benefits. Current changes are both hormonal and psychological. I just don't feel as needy for sex, affection or anything else. The obsessive sexual fantasies of my youth have also disappeared. Everyone is different, of course. I certainly wouldn't quarrel with anyone at any age enjoying romantic interludes of any nature.

Re:Sorry, no

[captain_dope_pants]

" Doctor, is it true that if I avoid drugs, alcohol, tobacco, fornicaton, exotic foods and run 5 miles a day I will live to 80 ? "
" No, but it will certainly feel like it ! "
;)

All I have to do is see what my Dad did...

[metaforest]

He was designing and troubleshooting analog and digital hardware.... radio and battery systems until the day he could legally tell his employer to fuck off and collect his Navy retirement and SSI...

He knows more about practical engineering than I ever will. And we still kick ideas around. He retired but did not stop being an Engineer.

I'm 46 and still writing code, and back at school for Biz Admin. I got to go back to my roots focusing on bare metal, and more recently embedded LINUX.

I'll stop writing code when you pull my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard.

Re:All I have to do is see what my Dad did...

[Anonymous Coward]

YES!

Same for me : you'll stop me programming OVER MY DEAD BODY only!

Been programming since the 70's in college, university, and work ... It like a drug : you get addicted to it and you definitly need it!

BT,
            Qc, Canada

Aging sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

We have enough software and computers now. Can we PLEASE start working on anti aging now? It's obvious that aging is a horror and turns brains into Jell-O.

Re:Aging sucks

[Oligonicella]

No on all counts. Aging does not suck, some people think it does. Anti-aging is a prominent research field and there is quite a bit of promise in some of the newer avenues. Aging is not a horror and does not turn the brain to Jell-O, diseases are and do. Not everyone is afflicted with them.

Re:Aging sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're essentially stating that discrimination, specifically age discrimination in this case, is wrong?

Oh god, not agile

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Let me ask, do you have that problem because both QA and managers think it's ok to just add new bugs to the board mid iteration? (Damn it, it's only 2-3 weeks. We can look at that shit at the next iteration.)

Re:Oh god, not agile

[gbjbaanb]

oh no.

I've done agile many years back and it as great - iterative development, regular releases, a 'vision' of what was needed to be added to the product per cycle... it worked.

Today... agile seems to be a way of doing massively heavyweight processes. we have 2 scrum boards, we can't decide what the timebox items should be, or how long it'll take to do them, or how many should be in there, or how much planning for the next timebox needs to be done.... gah! its all planning on our agile nonsense.

Its not agile, lets put it that way.

Re:Oh god, not agile

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Agile was born from small teams, and conceived and run successfully by the technical people themselves.

Managers heard about this. They interpreted "agile" to mean "do things faster with fewer people". They then took control, and built tons of process B.S. around it, in direct violation of the word and the spirit of the Agile Manifesto, to find ways to micromanage.

It's hilarious to think of some of the processes that are called "Agile" in my workplace.

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Terje Mathisen]

I've been programming since 1977, and I'm still doing it, although my job description hasn't had "programmer" in it since 1984:

(My first job out of university was writing digital signal analysis sw for a research institute, I did that from 1981 to 84.)

During the last few years I've been involved with crypto (AES) and graphics optimization, multicore computing as well as a few programming competitions:
I suspect that I'm probably 20 years older than most of the other quarter/semi-finalists at the two Facebook Hacker Challenges.

The main/only/sufficient reason is of course that I love doing it!

Solving puzzles is something I would pay to do, so getting paid is a great deal imho.

(My official job these days is to be the in-house IT troubleshooter for a very large Norwegian IT company, I manage to sneak in some programming here as well, often some Perl to analyze network trace/log files.)

Terje

Grumpy Mode ON

[florescent_beige]

May I paraphrase?: "That silly stuff engineers do? Fun and easy compared to the really hard important grown-up job us executives do."

Re:Grumpy Mode ON

[Anonymous Coward]

I head one of our firm's development projects. Lately one of the VPs has been sitting in on our hitlist meetings because the project has strategic implications. I'm pretty sure he's shocked by how hard and how much is involved in just getting a little app up on an unfamiliar platform.

Career

[Anonymous Coward]

The first job out of school: Senior Software Engineer. Title twenty years later: Senior Software Engineer. Plan to retire as: Senior Software Engineer.

For some reason, the HR keeps sending out career management memos suggesting everybody should be hating their job and wanting out.

Re:Career

[Smallpond]

Senior Software Engineer for a new grad? I guess your first employer had no standards.

Re:Career

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a postgraduate degree and had something to show. But I've also worked with a 19-year-old lead architect in a medium-size tech company. A high-school graduate and deserving of his position. Your value to your employer isn't determined by your years in the field.

Programming? Math!

[tulcod]

Programming is sort of like getting to work a puzzle all day long. I actually enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable. You get to shut out all your other thoughts and just concentrate on this little thing you're trying to do, to make work it. It's nice, very enjoyable.

You guys should get into math.

Re:Programming? Math!

[wdef]

Google say they preferentially hires maths graduates over comp sci grads. They say mathematics graduates are better at problem solving than comp sci degree holders. And of course, most applied maths courses require you to learn some programming anyway.

Re:Programming? Math!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can study both. I did that degree almost a quarter of a century ago (it was called Mathematics and Computation then) at the suggestion of one of my teachers and its one of the best choices I ever made.

66 and retired -- but not by choice

[mckellar75238]

I wrote code for a little over 20 years, starting when I was 30-something. Then I got caught in a layoff in the double-whammie of the dotcom bubble bursting and 9/11; by the time people were hiring again, my resume had gone completely stale and I was in my mid-50s. Even taking some retooling classes, i couldn't find anyone who would hire me. I ended up retiring out of a retail job that barely paid the bills. Now I'm living on savings and Social Security; fortunately, the savings survived all of the turmoil, so it's enough.

I know I did some things wrong (didn't take XXX classes, spent too much time on YYY job boards, didn't get to the ZZZ networking sessions, ...) while looking for another job; that's not the point. If someone offered me a job coding, I'd probably take it, enjoy it, and do it well, but I've given up hope finding it for myself; the repeated "Sorry, we're not interested -- Next!" just got too painful to endure, so I quit trying.

So, why am I grumping about and not adding anything to the conversation? Partly to get it off my chest, and partly to make this one point: The older you get, the harder it is to find someone who will hire you. I don't know why that is, or even if it's true for everyone, but it certainly was for me. If you're over 30, keep an eye on what's happening around you. If it looks like things are going south, jump ship while you still can. It's a lot easier to get a new job if you look while you're still in the old one.

Re:66 and retired -- but not by choice

[wdef]

I know this is true for a lot of people but mentality also counts a lot. An energetic, bright, open, experienced 50-something can crap all over most 20-somethings when it comes to overcoming problems and getting big things done. Middle-aged workers can have better judgement and far better communications skills, too: wisdom comes with age and experience. I'm expecting it to get tough post-60 though.

Re:66 and retired -- but not by choice

[englishstudent]

bummer dude. sorry to hear that.

Re:66 and retired -- but not by choice

[KingTank]

You should start a personal programming project, or try some freelance jobs on vworker.com. Vworker jobs suck and pay incredibly poorly, but it's a great way to get started again, particularly since nobody will have a clue how old you are.

Re:66 and retired -- but not by choice

[wdef]

Or, if you're not making money, you might as well get across the code base of a significant open source project and start sending them patches. If you pick a project that is key (or will be key) to something, and you build your worth with that project until you are a respected team member, you've almost certainly made yourself highly employable. Or: write documentation, no-one wants to do that. I know one very famous coder who started that way.

Re:66 and retired -- but not by choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Hair dye worked for me. I was having no problem getting interviews, but after dying my hair I started getting offers from about half my interviews. I'm currently working at a great place.

david_thornley (who has already moderated here)

Reasons why older coders might write plainer code?

[waterbear]

... but the code your wrote; more maintainable now, or then?

Interesting point. I'm returning just now to re-use/update/port some stuff I wrote a while back, some of it 5+ years ago, and even some bits from 24 years ago. Sometimes I find the rationale was clear enough, other times I have to kick myself before I can figure it out again, and there is one awkward little knot that still works but I completely forgot how and why, and so far I didn't manage to untie it.

What this does remind me, though, is that my memory is not getting any better. So for fresh code now, I insert more and longer spell-it-out comments than I used to give, and generally try to forget about compressing executable things, because speed, with modern compilers and processors, is just not a problem for what I'm doing. I do know that in future, without the commentaries, it would take me even longer to get (again) the reasons why this stuff was going in just there.

-wb-

deadline

[englishstudent]

It's all fun and games until you put a deadline on it.

60 here...

[Rob Y.]

After watching how the various regimes running (and buying, and selling, and outsourcing) my company feel about programmers, I don't think I would ever go into it as a young person today. But a strange thing has happened. Of all the people that have been there all this time, I'm one of the few that has survived all the M&A shenannigans and outsourcings. It seems that those who moved up into management roles were more replaceable than those of us who stayed technical. Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.

This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it. So far, every manager who's engineered the next sell-off of the company has been richly rewarded. The company's for sale again, and I can't imagine anybody being stupid enough to buy it. But fools abound, and I'm sure the current crop has their golden parachutes in order...

Re:60 here...

[greg1104]

As for when the stupidity will stop, I'll only point out that you just described yourself like a 2012 version of the 2002 Cobol programmer, shortly after they were re-hired/promoted to fix Y2K issues. And there will be certainly be a new incarnation of exactly the same situation 10 years from now, too, just with different technology yet again. "Ask Slashdot 2022: Are Ruby programmers still relevant?"

Re:60 here...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really get where your coming from as a younger programmer (27). There's a company nearby I worked for a few years ago after dropping out of college. For the first year I had it easy, the programmers beside me were all very knowledgeable and serious about their work, we got along really well and churned out software that their clients preferred over the big name alternatives. Eventually they began to adopt ridiculous patterns and practices, instead of hiring people for their skill in the field they were hiring based on "equal rights" quotas, and I found my fellow programmers leaving one by one. I stuck with it the longest, came a time when I felt like I was a teacher for these newbies they kept hiring in because very few of them had any clue what they were doing. Ultimately what got me to leave was a couple of them in particular began to put in code that I recognized from codeproject articles. I pointed this out to my boss, showed him the codeproject articles, and before I knew it they were threatening me with discrimination charges. I gave him my notice the very next day and left soon after.

That company has since devolved into a conveyor belt between hired and fired for people to fill a quota. As far as I know, they have been the target of lawsuits for code that was used outside the terms of it's license. But they are still going because their a mortgage company that can afford to screw up a lot.

Re:60 here...

[Anonymous Coward]

But they are still going because their a mortgage company that can afford to screw up a lot.

should be "they're"

Re:60 here...

[plover]

Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.

This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it.

My company has made similar incorrect assumptions about coders being "cogs in the machine", and a couple years ago the CIO reorganized our entire shop around the concept of cogs, instead of around products. Software now costs roughly four times to produce than what it cost before, takes roughly four times as long to produce, is of overall much lower quality, and the only thing that keeps any little bits of it afloat are those of us who were effective before the re-org. (Needless to say, that re-org drove a large number of the highly qualified people out.) It's so bad now that the business people are starting to ask "why the hell should we ask you for software? If we really wanted software this crappy, we could save your salaries and just hire a bunch of incompetent contractors ourselves."

All we can do is hang on and hope there's still a few jobs left once the board has figured out what's happened and fires the CIO for gross incompetence. But of course that's highly unlikely, as the CIO has a PhD in Political Maneuvering; that job certainly wasn't granted on the basis of competence of understanding computer systems.

Re:60 here...

[cavebison]

Totally agree. But it's the way the market operates unfortunately. The system of share trading means companies have to always focus on shareholder value, and this doesn't necessarily mean value to customer or value in any other sense at all really. What matters most is the market's *perception* of the company. The rest is just a means to an end for those with controlling shares.

It's very sad, very corrupting and not at all in line with the fluffy stories we, as a species, like to tell ourselves.

I've long come to the conclusion that humans are neurotic by nature. :)

It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable.

[Roninsan]

Its not just banging away at the keyboard or the elegance of the code your write, it is the heart's desire and the enjoyment you get. I have met too many even good programmers that state as soon as they get off work, the last thing they want to see is a computer. My retort to them is they are in the wrong field. I'm 58, took my first assembly code class in 1970, still in high school, at the college next door, for an IBM 360. Been with it every since. I have worked both sides, hardware and software. I currently work with Kennedy Space Center/CCAFS still pouring over code and when I get home, the first thing I do is log onto my home network. Every year I take my oldest son to Black Hat and DefCon at my expense. (DefCon is a lot more fun and the better of the 2 in IMHO). It is one of the only fields that is in a constant change and continuous study required. "They'll get my laptop when they pry my cold dead fingers from it."

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think the question is incorrectly phrased - "Should you still be coding at 50" has an aspect of "Would you want to...", which I'd expect to be true for anyone with a passion for the subject matter.

But it also has an implicit assumption of "Someone would pay you to code at 50", which, IMHO, is the much more unlikely (and relevant) part.

I've worked at some of the high tech giants, and, quite frankly, the number of people over 40 outside of management (and, for that matter, even in first level management) is very, very low. Their performance (and the associated reviews) pale in comparison to the passionate one-year-out-of-college burner who's always visibly fixing issues and burning the midnight oil. Besides, there is the cool factor in associating with youngsters compared to the ick of making friends with someone who's visibly old. In organizations that mix up the org structure every few years, that becomes relevant.

Coding, just like professional soccer, is a discipline that selects out folks over 40 very harshly; I am not arguing that this ought to be the case, but for better of for worse, this is something to deal with. Work on your parachute.

Re:Reasons why older coders might write plainer co

[Nerdfest]

I rarely write comments any longer, and only use them when I can't make the code any clearer (or to explain *why* I did something, rather than what I'm trying to do.). 'What' comments rarely get updated when the code changes, and can frequently do more harm than good. I feel a little sad when I feel I need to add a comment to explain what I'm doing. Computing power helps these days. Back in the old days when writing realtime code, the stack overhead from breaking things up into functions/methods would kill you.

Re:Reasons why older coders might write plainer co

[waterbear]

Comments can become indispensable when the reason for putting something in (and the criterion for its correctness) is external to the code itself. I used sometimes to think "it must be obvious where that came from", but now with failing memory I often find it's not as obvious as I thought it should be. :(

-wb-

Riiiiggghhhttt - PROVE IT, jackass... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt you can, and I asked this of you before here -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872517

* Big deal, even IF you can prove it - 1 lousy program? How well'd it review in trade publications?? How'd it do in technical trade show contests???

(IT HASN'T & NEVER WILL!)

APK

P.S.=> I will give you 1 thing though - your alleged code? It has NO BUGS - since the code with ZERO LINES TO IT, has no errors, lmao... & I wager it's true about you, doing what YOU SAID was "wrong" (spouting your credentials, but you 'strangely' (yea, right - NOT) can't PROVE it either... I've seen "your kind" 1000's of times online, & done this very thing to them (especially those like "you", troll, that *think* being a "registered 'luser'" on some forums makes you "Superior"... lol, again - NOT!)...

... apk

Re:Riiiiggghhhttt - PROVE IT, jackass... apk

[Oligonicella]

Dude/ette, you have proved absolutely nothing about yourself. Not one thing. Why? You're anonymous. Three initials at the bottom does nothing. Therefore, I need prove something to you why?

The reality is..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were to sit anyway and program all day it wouldn't be an office- it would be a cube farm with low partitions, if you have partitions.. and at fifty you wouldn't want to give up your office for that horror show. coders and IT workers get absolute crap to work with, good luck searching for a door to hide behind.

Bravo - perfect reply to the "ne'er-do-well"...

[Anonymous Coward]

I did the same here -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872517

* I absolutely HATE these little shits with their "registered 'luser'" accounts that *think* they're "superior" for that reason alone over AC posters... since MOST can be cornered by simple logic like you used, easily, proving they're "all talk" & when the FEW TIMES they aren't? They managed to do 1 single app, & one that hasn't done that well @ all in the eyes of others in the art & science of computing...

APK

P.S.=> You know it, I KNOW IT, & yes... everyone & anyone else reading, knows it as well - rest assured on that, & see my subject-line...

... apk

Re:Bravo - perfect reply to the "ne'er-do-well"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Aw, baby got his account banned, and is all poopy-pants because people with accounts mock his idiocy.

Re:Bravo - perfect reply to the "ne'er-do-well"...

[Anonymous Coward]

How stupid could you be troll? He nuked you here http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41873659

Re:Reasons why older coders might write plainer co

[Nerdfest]

That would be the *why* type of comments. Frequently a small paragraph rather than a simple one-liner as well. I think the failing memory (or sometimes it seems like it) can be a benefit; you know that in 6 months you *won't* remember, where in the the past, you *thought* you would.

Why is this even a news item?

[roc97007]

Mental exercise significantly decreases the chances of dementia. I'm 56 and involved in lots of things, not the least of which is coding for a large company. Someone once said "learning keeps you young" and he was right. My last career switch was at 53. I picked up a new, fairly technical hobby at 54 at which I'm becoming fairly decent. Earlier this year I completed a 4,400 mile solo motorcycle trip.

There are concessions, of course. My knees are blown out. I can't run or bicycle anymore, and put those things away with true regret. But other things have replaced this. Walks with the dog, (with knee braces) long motorcycle trips, and driving daughter and her friends to skiing trips. (I hang out in the bar and write. Some of my best articles have come from there.)

If you think your life is over at 50, I can tell you from experience, it is only if you want it to be. I see some of my contemporaries sitting in their barcaloungers in front of the boob tube waiting for life to end, and it makes me sad. A few of them used to be sharp, and can no longer carry on a conversation that doesn't involve reminiscing. The people I associate with tend to be decades younger than I, because they're still doing stuff and I am unwilling to give up on doing stuff.

At 65, my mother had a bad heart attack, resulting in a triple bypass. She quit smoking, started a new business, and now in her seventies is a successful small businessperson. But the biggest change I've noticed is that for the first time in years her thoughts are clear, she can carry on a coherent conversation, and she's interested in learning new things.

I thought it had been pretty much settled that activity (mental and physical) tends to keep the parts working. I'm not sure why this is a news item. But I note other threads like this, even in Slashdot, of people worried that their careers will be over at 40. Well, maybe if you're a trapeze artist, but otherwise, it's pretty much up to you.

Too old to rock and roll, too young to die...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reinventing myself as a mobile developer these days - fun! I like being on the bleeding edge, where no one has explored much. No one knows what they're doing, since this stuff has never been done before, so my experience helps me.

Actual coding is the smallest part of modern softw

[MCRocker]

Actual coding is the smallest part of modern software development not just because of all the meetings agile techniques like Scrum require, but also because we're expected to support the code we write instead of just writing it in isolation, tossing it over the wall and expecting some other sucker to maintain it. The theory is that if the developers have to support the code themselves, then they'll pay more attention to quality, reliability, stability and other factors that improve maintainability.

Of course other related work like design, documentation, code review, testing, deployment, performance analysis and so on contribute to making actual coding a small part of the whole process.

Jobs with 20 hour seat-of-the-pants hackathon sessions in some low level language that gets dumped straight to production are increasingly rare.

The question is whether all of this overhead is worth the effort? If done right, maybe all of this turns coding into professional software engineering that can reliably produce high quality solutions to business needs... or maybe it's just another failed attempt, like waterfall, that adds all sorts of useless overhead to fool management into thinking they have some sort of control.

So far, I'm thinking that it may actually help, but the jury's out and I think it's highly dependent on your organization and individual team. Even great ideas can be need up by poor implementation.

Re:40: I'm 55...

[RickL]

That agrees with my experience. After a certain age, there is an assumption that if you haven't been promoted to management, there is something wrong with you. I haven't worked as a programmer for about four years. I still love programming and code for fun, but I'd be happy if my job title never mentioned software again.

I'm in school training for a new career. One in which my 44 years--and anything since the last glacial maximum--is considered "recent." No doubt, I will still use my programming skills in my new career, and they will be a good selling feature after I graduate. As a programmer, I can count the number of times I've been paid to work outdoors on no hands. As geologist, it is part of the job. Even as a student, I've been some amazing places and seen incredible things. Any career that requires you to hike with a hammer, a bottle of acid, and a set of colored pencils is a good career.

Re:40: I'm 55...

[gregor-e]

I just turned 55, and have been writing software my whole career. I still enjoy it, but it's been a long time since I had that feeling like there was blue fire coming out of my fingers as I write. I find it has become pleasantly mundane. Beats the heck out of working for a living, though.

If we don't do coding, what exactly do we do?

[iamacat]

Not only management is an entirely different field requiring a different personality and skill set, but it's a pyramid scheme. By definition, only a minority of engineers can become managers. So if the choice is learning an entirely new profession on level field with newcomers or staying good at what you are good at, have tons of experience in and which is still in high demand, I think it's a no brainer. I fully expect to be coding until retirement, although I do notice that my average work day is 2-3 hours of actually writing code and the rest of the time helping others.

Re:If we don't do coding, what exactly do we do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly, I *entered* the industry as a manager and I work with devs. I code out of interest at home and to better understand programming in general.

73 and still coding.

[RNLockwood]

I did my first coding at 37 on using punch cards and coded for cash the next year. A couple of years ago I had to switch from C/C++ and Windows to Java on LINUX and have learned Java and some LINUX. When my Raspberry Pi arrives in a couple of weeks I'll start on Python! Mostly my job descriptions have been Ecologist with some coding. I look at most of the coding I've done as problem/puzzle solving.

Re:73 and still coding.

[DerPflanz]

Why is there no +1 respect ?

Re:73 and still coding.

[LifesABeach]

What's funny is when I say, "I have used the Star Wheel."

Re:73 and still coding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because LINUX is not an acronym.

Re:73 and still coding.

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 transposed age numbers

coding is absolutely necessary for techies

[cellocgw]

My 'creds' : coding since 1968, not as a career or software jock, but for fun and to support my research/analysis as student and engineer (in that order :-) ).
While you don't have to be a total c++/java/perl expert to do engineering, you sure as heck have to be able to move on from slide rules and TI-88's to actual programming if you want to be a productive engineer.
I'm 57 and continue to enjoy writing stuff in R (as well as explaining to people why LabView is a recipe for disaster if you try to apply it to large projects). Then again, I like abstract algebra and topology, so I suppose I'm an outlier (yeah, I do stats too).

younger

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 19, been coding for about 2 years. And I really don't plan on stopping anytime in the next few decades.

Another 73 and still coding.

[jimbrooking]

Webmaster adept with HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP and MySQL and lovin' it!

however, you don't become a billionaire by coding

[Anonymous Coward]

Coding is great, and fun, but as more and more people do it, the price for coding keeps dropping. Back in 1980, coders were rare beasts and commanded fairly decent salaries ($40k/yr, as I recall, about $112k/yr today)... Not so any more..

Coding alone won't get you a nice standard of living, while moving into management will.

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Smallpond]

My experience is that I started as a hardware engineer, then spent 25 years as an engineering manager. I now have a job as a programmer, work sane hours, and am a lot more productive than the "one-year-out-of-college" kids who are generally creating as many problems as they're solving. Some of my code is now in the Linux kernel and I'm a lot happier going to work.

65+ and won't stop coding

[theoa]

Disclaimer: I'm 65 and have enough money to retire, go fishing, whatever.

I wrote my first app in 1967 - a failed attempt to multiply two matrices in Fortran.

Today I code 3D apps.

WebGL, libraries such as Three.js and the whole FOSS thing enable me to build stuff I've been dreaming about for decades - no large teams, no huger servers, no VCs needed.

I'm having a blast! << maybe one day /. will allow me to show that sentence using particles and shaders...

71 and still working as a developer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I'm only doing .NET, TSQL, MVC, Entity Framework, etc.

You get to shut out all your other thoughts

[durdur]

No, not any more. When I was a young programmer, you could disappear into an office and just code all day. But one thing that has happened in the last couple of decades is that coding has become much more collaborative. Even if you are not doing extreme programming, with another coder practically in your lap, test-driven development, continuous integration and methodologies like Scrum mean that you are spending a lot of your day with QA and other devs. Break something and you have 20 guys on your back to fix it, stat. Put in some nifty but unorthodox code and then get it reviewed out of the product. I'm sure there are lots of people who thrive in that environment, and it does tend to improve the quality level of the software, but it means that you don't get to fly solo anymore, and that is what drove a lot of introvert/geek types into programming in the first place. It's also a bit of a shift if you haven't grown up as a dev in the new world, although I've been able to deal with it.

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Anne Thwacks]

Yes, God knows why anyone would want to employ a person with enough experience to avoid a major fuckup.

Oh, Wait...

Your code only gets better

[bytesex]

Seriously, it does.

Age does make a difference for most of us...

[heyrandy]

I learned Autocoder for the IBM 1401 in 1961 and have been coding ever since (I'm retired and just turned 70). As I moved more into the management role in SW development, I used to pick one major effort a year, eg learning to find hidden lines in a graphic projection one year in the 1980's, just for the challenge (for me). I'd carry around a notebook to write the code and review it over and over. Since it took me a long time to finish any effort it was the best desk-checked code I'd ever written. I agree with the comment about puzzle solving -- it's all one never ending puzzle and usually quite a pleasant activity -- until you screw up and nothing works for weeks at a time for "no reason at all". There is a definite change as I age though. While I can do most anything I want in C++ or Java in terms of algorithms, learning enough about new systems to do useful programs is getting tougher and tougher. I'd like to do some things in iOS but I dread the experience of being clueless for an extended period of time. Tying things together and making sense of a system doesn't come quite so easy any more, especially when your attention span is asymptotically approaching Sesame Street. It's a hard slog. I keep trying, but it's nice to have physical activities (like woodworking) to keep a balance.

Re:Actual coding is the smallest part of modern so

[aztracker1]

I've found that more and more a kanban approach tends to make people a little happier... tasks come in, tasks go out... the next task is prioritized, and interaction with others during a coding session should be mitigated by your manager... I'm also finding a unix-like approach of small bits of software that can pump in/out logic separately are a bit better than monolithic tightly coupled libraries... less OO, and more functional piped abstractions. Today I'm doing more of this in Node.js, it lets me get stuff done, usually with less code, tooling and overhead. You could do similar in C/C++, but that brings a compilation step into the mix. When I have to fire up an IDE and do a build to check/test/run/change anything, it just seems like overhead that shouldn't be needed anymore.

Using unix-like principles, and node (or any other scripted language) lets me get stuff done... following conventions make it more maintainable. I'm 37 and still learning... I can imagine I'll still be doing so for another few decades.

25 and too old to learn to program???

[Nivag064]

I am 61, and certainly not the oldest still programming. My first 2 paid programming positions involved FORTRAN IV and COBOL, I now use Java. Recently I've played with Python and Groovy.

A few years ago I met a young man in his mid twenties, who said he was too old to learn programming!

I wrote my first program (in BASIC) when I was eighteen, to display what happens when you feed the sine function complex numbers - I did it for fun. The computer was the size of a 4 draw filing cabinet, and had about 4K bytes - not 4 megabytes, nor 4 gigabytes! Now my main development machine has 16 gigabytes.

Currently I am writing a system to to store, retrieve, and display tagged images using Java on Linux. The full system will be backed by a Postgres database and will be accessed by a web front end.

Re:25 and too old to learn to program???

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital asset management?

Re:25 and too old to learn to program???

[ananthap]

Currently I am writing a system to to store, retrieve, and display tagged images using Java on Linux. The full system will be backed by a Postgres database and will be accessed by a web front end. Interesting. Please post the results. OK

Started at 15, got out at 30, back in at 45

[jeffcox65]

...this time with way more experience, world knowledge and self-knowledge.

I went into programming with the kind of wide eyed exuberance that only a teenager can have.

Got completely used up and burned out after 12 years with a company that started strong and went straight down the tubes. I've bummed around since then, knowing that I didn't want to work for different morons in another corporation.

Finally though, smartphone programming offers me programming on my own terms: MY project, MY hours, MY tech support --> MY profits. No more apologizing for other's mistakes, no more Dilbert bosses. When I was leaving my former company I was fond of saying "If I want to work for morons I'll work for myself." ;)

I can work from home. No more endless, useless meetings. I can work from anywhere. True freedom, enjoying the fruits of my labor.

Yes, I want to program when I'm 50, but on my terms.

Coding keeps you young!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am 64, going on 65 (in January 2013). I still code, and I think that it keeps me young. My brain, at least. I have been designing and building major system software (distributed, high-availability, fault-resiliant) for 30 years, and though I mostly guide younger engineers in their coding these days, I still do a lot of the "heavy lifting" for a tier-one mobile phone manufacturer. I code in bash, perl, C, C++, Java, and Python. Other languages in my quiver include Cobol, Dibol, BASIC, Pascal, APL, Smalltalk, and assembler (and others that I cannot remember any longer :-). The intellectual challenges of programming complex systems keeps the synapses working well. As the saying goes, "If you don't use it, you will lose it." That is just SO true! At least as I have observed in my life. My current job has me designing and writing code to monitor the health and performance of multiple large-scale data centers in a world-wide context. I'm even dusting off my old engineering/math skills to write software for prediction of system behavior in real-time - Kalman filters 101! :-) Complex event processing? Not so hard. System trending analysis that allows one to predict with some certainty that a system, or group of systems, will fail in N days... not so easy, and that is where the work I am doing is going.

So, I may physically die at age 80,90,100 or whatever, but at that point, it will NOT be my mind that goes!

The Evolution of Attitudes Toward Programming

[dorpus]

Back in the 1980s when I grew up, there was a widely held view that only autistic personalities who were incapable of interacting with other human beings would want to program computers. I liked programming, and my sixth grade teachers felt I should talk to a psychologist.

Today, people no longer believe only autistics would want to program, but there is a strange view that only people under age 30 should program. Why? Should book writers retire at age 30 too?

Re:40: I'm 55...

[postagoras]

55 too, still coding... dunno what all the fuss is about. Programming nowadays is a helluva lotta fun... each line of code compares to 10K lines of assembly language, deployment is continuous rather than once every six months, what you deploy is always in beta... it's Paradise!

Still learning and improving at 54

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 54 and been coding since I was 18 (TI calculator, Commodore PET, TRS80 etc etc) but professionally only since I was 24.

I can look back at code I wrote 6 months ago and realize I've improved significantly since then. It's quite amazing because I've read all kinds of bullshit that our "cognitive abilities" go down at this age but it just isn't true. I'm learning faster than ever because the more you know, the faster you learn.

Most of my peers, in their 30s, are still stuck in complexity and the joy of making things complex which I passed over 30 years ago. I can see problems coming 6 months ahead of time but I'm so far ahead of peers and management they don't believe me, and are arrogant. I say my peace, and if they don't want to listen, they deserve what they get. These things are as obvious as daylight when you've seen them 3 or 4 times in your career.

Most of my career has been C and C++ programming from the lowest level of abstraction (device drivers, interrupt handlers, hand coded assembly modules linked to C programs all the way to the high level abstractions, and applications using classes. While I love C++ for allowing that breadth of abstraction I prefer the higher level languages like Perl, Python, and Javascript when I actually need to get something done quickly and don't mind my code being open source. I was a C programmer and there were aspects of the language with continually bothered me. When C++ came out it was everything I had wanted to improve C. I am completely compatible with C++, as a person and a professional.

I am not as "clever" as some of my peers and I'm not a fast reader like they are (eyesight not as good). But my designs are simpler and more reliable because I shun complexity and attempt to boil down the problem to its essential elements before solving it. I also have a lot of experience with how things break and avoid brittle constructs. Of course I'm guilty of shlocking stuff together when under time pressure but I consider that a skill also. Not everything has to be a masterpiece.

For example, the biggest brain block I've seen in my peers is the inability or unwillingness to use exceptions properly, or even at all. Whenever this subject comes up 95% of the programmers I know just go stupid. Exceptions can remove 70% of the garbage from most programs. I attribute it to the fact that most programmers don't really view their code as multiple calls down a chain of functions, stack frames, and that an exception throw is really just a big return. For example the new "Go" language doesn't have exceptions! The first few days I tried using exceptions in C++ I was sold on the concept. In fact, it was something I had been unconsciously desiring for a long time.

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think the question is incorrectly phrased - "Should you still be coding at 50" has an aspect of "Would you want to...", which I'd expect to be true for anyone with a passion for the subject matter.

But it also has an implicit assumption of "Someone would pay you to code at 50", which, IMHO, is the much more unlikely (and relevant) part.

A lot depends on if your company treats its codebase as something valuable or considers coders a cost.

I'm 50, I write code, no one reports to me, I mentor the newbies as needed. I earn 10x what they do. I took a 2x salary cut to take this job, and I love it. Thankfully management actually reads the code I write and judges those 100 lines/day are actually worth the money.

Re:I'm going to defend him against that

[Oligonicella]

"I'm going to defend him against that."

And you will prove you are not him, how? Meaningless.

"SNIDE & SMARMY jackass like you'

i shall awaken at 2AM crying out in anguish at your admonition, AC.

-- abc

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Gorobei]

I know the feeling.

What language? How long from idea to production? (Python and minutes here.)

Re:EXACTLY... love how you put it! apk

[Oligonicella]

AC defending an AC defending an AC....

Boxes in boxes in boxes. All typed by the same guy.

Re:Actual coding is the smallest part of modern so

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Actual coding is the smallest part of modern software development not just because of all the meetings agile techniques like Scrum require, but also because we're expected to support the code we write instead of just writing it in isolation, tossing it over the wall and expecting some other sucker to maintain it. The theory is that if the developers have to support the code themselves, then they'll pay more attention to quality, reliability, stability and other factors that improve maintainability.

I'm seeing at least 2 problems crop up with that idea though. The first one is that it doesn't take much to morph from us supporting the code after the user gives it the ol' college try to what I currently see which is "Ehh, if I have any trouble I'll immediately ask dev for support." (That thing about the usb device? That was literally true, somebody actually came to me and ask for help setting up a 3rd party usb device instead of trying to figure it out or googling it.) The other one is that some of our code wasn't originally done by the development team. (So basically the code is dumped on us and then we get the "fun" job of supporting it and fixing it.)

Inspiring

[martypantsROK]

As a guy who took a few wrong turns in his career (software engineer -> software sales -> computer/math teacher) I'm inspired by all the older folks still out there making money and making good software. I'm looking forward to getting back into programming and design. I've been doing a boatload of new stuff, mostly Java/Android and am hoping to get hired by a company who wants someone with skills regardless of their age. I'm 52 now (but look 35 and could kick the crap out of a lot of 20-somethings) It's really good to see the older software folks. I hope finding a hiring manager who appreciates older folks is just as easy.

Coming up on 58 and still coding

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been programming since I was in high school in 1970. I tend to say that I have programmed assembly language on more architectures than most engineers can name. Since about 1983 most of my coding has been in C. I find that I have a pretty good pattern patcher in my head for bugs. Because of that, I regularly catch bugs just seeing patches pass by in my email. Even if I know nothing about the code the patch is for, I spot problems fairly often. Sometimes even in C++ code (which I don't use much).

Every time I think I am good at it, I eventually notice that with more time I have gotten a bit better in some way. Some of it is due to exposure to many environments and people. I have learned quite a bit form the Linux kernel developers, and that resulted in a major change to my C coding style. I've also learned that we all have blind spots and that the real benefit of a team is to have people with different approaches to problems.

I've been through many of the fads that have been popular at various times. The take-away from them is that most have something good in them, but none of them is a universal answer. Perhaps the best thing in Agile is to review and change procedures over time. That isn't a complete endorsement of Agile, but it does make sense to adapt to conditions. I think any given process has weaknesses and by changing processes over time, you can address those weaknesses as they become bigger issues. Like I said before, I don't think there is one process that is always right, so if you aren't changing your processes, whatever area that is your current process' weakness is probably becoming a bigger and bigger problem. If you don't think your current process has a weakness, you just haven't recognized it yet.

I still enjoy programming, but truly most effort is really spent debugging existing things, rather than writing new code. Resolving problems is sometimes very gratifying.

My retirement plan is to continue working on open source, most likely Linux.

The ICK???

[FrankHS]

The ick of making friends with someone who's visibly old. ???? Most of us old farts don't wear adult diapers, don't have old man smell, and if you actually talked to us, you might just find out that we have insights and ideas worth hearing.

Think about this. Someday you will be old. When that day comes, do you want people to think of you as "Icky"??

64

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still coding at age 64, though I got a late start at 28. Due to a couple of setbacks in the stock market and a wife who is 11 years younger than I am, I plan to work until I'm 70. Surprisingly, after 17 years as an independent contractor, my primary customer offered me a job in February and I surprised myself by accepting it. I've done everything from COBOL to C# with PowerBuilder and VB and a bunch of other language/platforms in between. It feels like I get a new job every 6-12 months without necessarily changing companies or co-workers. Sometimes I think the stress will kill me, but then I make a breakthrough and it feels like the sun came out. It's a good life, really, and I'm lucky to have it.

Solution, if you don't mind spending $800

[justthinkit]

Superfocus.com

Re:40 - 58 and still coding

[Mister Mudge]

Spent years with mainframe Assembler, and what seems like dozens of languages in between then and now - currently writing PHP, Javascript, Ruby, HTML, CSS, and most things webby. I've been writing code since the late 1970s and still love what I do.

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Anonymous Coward]

56 here, and I haven't yet found anything that I'd rather be doing for work. Yes, it's not quite the thrill it used to be, but it's still he best game in town.

I've firmly resisted any suggestion that I should move into management, design or architecture roles, and I work as a contractor so I get the chance at a little variety. It's a good life.

79 and counting

[drissel]

Working full-time on a cutting edge product. I plan to work as long as I can. Program at work; program at home.

Regards,
    Bill Drissel

Coding again

[Anonymous Coward]

At 40 I gave up a 20 yr programmer career to do something else. Now at 45 I felt compelled to get back into my one true love, programming again. Thinking I might have some ramp-up time, I dove in unafraid. Turns out it's like riding a bike. I surprised myself with what I was able to knock out.

20 years ago we wondered what programming would be like now. Not much different to be honest. And I love it.

Keeping yourself active is the key

[RotateLeftByte]

both mentally any physically.

My mother is 90. She's currently somewhere in Sri Lanka on holiday. She also does the Times (UK) crossword pretty well every day, lives alone and does keep fit three times a week. No bad for someone who has had both her hips and knees replaced.

I can only wish that I'm as active as her if I get to her age.

ignore

[symes]

correcting a moderation error by posting

Why not?

[garry_g]

Contrary what many companies nowadays believe, I don't think people stop being good programmers just because they age ... I reckon it's often just the results of the Peter Principle (look it up if you don't know it) ...

I've started programming at 12 on a ZX Spectrum in a store, later advanced to a C64, Amiga and finally Unix ... been through Basic, 6502 assembler, 68k assembler, Pascal (yuck - and another of Wirth's languages I can't or won't remember the name anymore), C (most of the code written in it), C++ (just a bit) and recently mostly PHP ... I still love it, even though I've not been doing much the last ~10 years ... I still more or less blow away anybody in the company (ISP/Network Consulting) when it comes to hacking some tool or solving some problem that require automation ... including and especially the folks that "learned" programming in School ... granted, we usually don't really need it, and we didn't hire people for programming. But compared to the people 20+ years ago, knowledge of programming nowadays is practically non existent.

For non-programmers programming must be wizardry ... trusting an experienced programmer is also hard ... in more than one occasion, I was asked to do a detailed plan of what would be needed and how it would have to be implemented ... doing that would have taken longer than the actual implementation I did ... (I believe there was a comic on Dilbert about that, too). I guess once you have many years of experience, some processes just "work" inside the brain, allowing you to get the work done without spending too many thoughts on it ... and that's the part one most likely doesn't lose either ... you may need to get back into the syntax, or parameters etc., but the actual "art" of how to program is still there ... also makes learning a new language easier ...

Oligonicella is YOUR real name?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rinse, Lather, & Repeat" -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41871953

* Another of your peers on /. told you that, not I... but, I'll be a "good citizen" & "recycle" it, by reusing it (since it fits!)...

(Being an AC poster doesn't matter, especially when "Oligoncella" isn't YOUR REAL FULL NAME EITHER, pal...)

APK

P.S.=> The day YOU can show the REST OF US READING that you've done more, better, & EARLIER than I have (as well as more times)? Is the day you can talk the way you did to the OP you "cut down" troll, OR myself:

"My Name is Ozymandias: King of Kings - Look upon my works, ye mighty, & DESPAIR..."

----

Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61

(&, for work done for EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on PAID CONTRACT (writing portions of their SuperCache program increasing its performance by up to 40% via my work) albeit, for their SuperDisk & HOW TO APPLY IT, took them to a finalist position @ MS Tech Ed, two years in a row 2000-2002, in its HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement).

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, 1997, "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue page 210, #1/first entry in fact (my work is there)

PC-WELT FEB 1998 - page 84, again, my work is featured there

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 - page 92, insert section, MUST HAVE WARES, my work is again, there

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - page 83, again, my work is featured there

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - page 100, my work is there

GERMAN PC BOOK, Data Becker publisher "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000, where my work is contained in it

HOT SHAREWARE Numero 46 issue, pg. 54 (PC ware mag from Spain), 2001 my work is there, first one featured, yet again!

Also, a British PC Mag in 2002 for many utilities I wrote, saw it @ BORDERS BOOKS but didn't buy it... by that point, I had moved onto other areas in this field besides coding only...

Being paid for an article that made me money over @ PCPitstop in 2008 for writing up a guide that has people showing NO VIRUSES/SPYWARES & other screwups, via following its point, such as THRONKA sees here -> http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=ee926d913b81bf6d63c3c7372fd2a24c&t=28430&page=3

It's also been myself helping out the folks at the UltraDefrag64 project (a 64-bit defragger for Windows), in showing them code for how to do Process Priority Control @ the GUI usermode/ring 3/rpl 3 level in their program (good one too), & being credited for it by their lead dev & his team... see here -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/handbook/Credits.html or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2993462&group_id=199532&atid=969873

Where it was NOT working for many folks there, before (submitted to the maker of the RepeatTimer class no less, & yes, it WORKS!)

----

What do I have to say about that much above? I can't say it any better, than this was stated already (from the greatest book of all time, the "tech manual for life" imo):

"But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." - Corinthians Chapter 10, Verse 10

(And, because I got LUCKY to have been exposed to some really GREAT classmates, professors, & colleagues on the job over time as well)

---

Mind you - that's only a SMALL PARTIAL LIST of some of my "favorites" only... there's a lot more where that came from! So again, for your reference:

The day YOU can show the REST OF US READING that you've done more, better, & EARLIER than I have (as well as more times)? Is the day you can talk the way you did to the OP you "cut down" troll, OR myself:

... apk

Re:Oligonicella is YOUR real name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Again I take it all back and I have no brain

... apk

Re:Oligonicella is YOUR real name?

[monkeykoder]

Dude why are you posting this about yourself?

Re:Oligonicella is YOUR real name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, why did he make you look so stupid here http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41885551

"Rinse, Lather, & Repeat"... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157

APK

P.S.=> Additionally/Lastly - You show us you've done MORE, BETTER, & EARLIER (as well as MORE TIMES) than I have, an AC poster, in the "art & science" of computing, in the eyes of others in respected written publications in this genre of computing, technical trade shows of high esteen in it also, PLUS have your code go into commercial products sold by certified MS parthers?

You can then say you "registered 'lusers'" are "better" than us AC posters... ok? GOOD LUCK - since, somehow?? I don't think you have, and that yes, you will NEED luck (more than that - you'll need to have outdone me, an AC poster)...

... apk

Re:"Rinse, Lather, & Repeat"... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it all back I have an IQ of 20 and smell like feet and BO. ... apk

Re:"Rinse, Lather, & Repeat"... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

apk burns yet another off topic troll attempting to impersonate him http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41885315

Oh yes, more bogus downmods... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

All trolls have's their mod points to down mod others with, nothing more, for attempted hidings of when they're wrong (doesn't hide a thing.)

APK

P.S.=> Thus - You might as well call their downmods an "admission of guilt"...

... apk

Explain 1 thing please... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

How did I get downmodded, and an ADMITTED TROLL got upmodded to +5 INSIGHTFUL for admitting his doing wrong -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872031

"?"

APK

P.S.=> A lot of folks are saying this site's falling apart on its discussion forums section of articles due to trolls using bogus methods & means - proof's RIGHT in the posts above this one that THEY ARE CORRECT! No small wonder the OP said "sometimes, I HATE slashdot"... & "sure" - that's JUST what those who OWN THE PLACE, really want (not)...

... apk

This place is overrun with trolls... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

All the unjustifiable downmods in the world can't affect the truth here -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41874645

APK

P.S.=> This forums is OVERRUN with trolls - no small wonder the OP said he is starting to HATE SLASHDOT when he was "intentionally misread" (WTF?)) & yet the scumbag troll doing it got a +5 INSIGHTFUL for pulling THAT shit? -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872031

EVEN ADMITTING HE "intentionally misread" the OP's post (and it was written JUST FINE for ANYONE that can read)... Come on - give us a break already - who do you trolls *think* you're fooling?

Man - this site's falling apart, & I am sure those who OWN it don't want that, but... they're LETTING it happen, oh well!

(It's "Slashdot's FUNERAL" as more & more folks leave it due to shenanigans and horseshit like that being "OK" here, right? Fools)...

... apk

You're SO "fooling us" (not)... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody's defending you, other than your alternate registered 'luser' accounts. Everyone knows it's done here, including a famous Open SORES guy:

"It just takes one Ubuntu sympathizer or PR flack to minus-moderate any comment. Unfortunately, once PR agencies and so on started paying people to moderate online communities, and to have hundreds of accounts each, things changed." - by Bruce Perens (3872) on Friday July 30 2010, @04:55PM (#33089192) Homepage Journal

FROM -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738364&cid=33089192

APK

P.S.=> Truer words were NEVER spoken - especially on this forums, since it's overrun by trolls abusing & gaming the moderation system, just as I showed here (literally) -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879263

That's where a troll ADMITTED he'd done wrong, harassing the OP there, admitting he "intentionally 'misread'" the OP here -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872031

Man... like THAT "fools anyone" & it certainly didn't JUSTIFY on valid grounds the reason for that +5 INSIGHTFUL he got for it either, for outright red-handed CAUGHT in his trolling antics stupidity:

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872031

Yes, this place is falling apart!

No small wonder the OP said "Sometimes, I hate slashdot"...

... apk

Re:Where's YOURS, chump? They're "NOT", lol... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't have anything to speak of apk hence the downmoderation of your post. He's a troll.

Show us you've done MORE, better, & earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Than this (that I did while you were STILL IN DIAPERS) -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157 in the art & science of computing...

* YOU manage THAT? Then, you'll have accomplished something... a lot more than using your "alternate registered 'luser'" accounts to UNJUSTIFIABLY DOWNMOD OTHERS WITH...

APK

P.S.=> Everyone KNOWS it goes on here, AND HOW IT'S DONE (even Mr. Bruce Perens of "Open SORES" fame):

"It just takes one Ubuntu sympathizer or PR flack to minus-moderate any comment. Unfortunately, once PR agencies and so on started paying people to moderate online communities, and to have hundreds of accounts each, things changed." - by Bruce Perens (3872) on Friday July 30 2010, @04:55PM (#33089192) Homepage Journal

FROM -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738364&cid=33089192

AND YET, we can see that a troll who ADMITTED "misreading intentionally" here was upmodded to +5 INSIGHTFUL (for what? Being an asshole troll?? Give us a break!)?

Explain 1 thing with valid justification - How did I get downmodded, and an ADMITTED TROLL got upmodded to +5 INSIGHTFUL for admitting his doing wrong here -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872031

Explain that... no, I will: This place is overrun with trolls & is falling apart... nothing more, I've seen it before & it's why this was said of slashdot:

7 Formerly Popular Sites that Are Dying:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/seven-popular-website-dying-110825.html

Guess what site's FIRST ON THAT LIST? No "small wonder" the site's former owners "souled-out" - they have seen it before, as I have, & got out while the getting was good... since, as you can see? Others are noting it also online...

... apk

"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny you ran from a SIMPLE CHALLENGE then, "Oligoncella" (your REAL name there? No) -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157

* Thus, when you manage to show you've done MORE, BETTER, & EARLIER than I have in the art & science of programming/computing?

Then, & ONLY THEN, can you say AC's are "inferior" to you "registered 'lusers'".... period!

APK

P.S.=> However - I know you can't show you've done more, better, & EARLIER than I have in the art & science of computing ( & YET, I am an AC poster here)...

Yes, everyone reading:

So much for "the superiority of registered 'lusers'", eh?

IF they're SO GREAT? Then, outdoing "lil' ole' me" AC should be CAKE for "Oligoncella", right?? LOL, apparently not...

... apk

He doesn't have a thing

[Anonymous Coward]

All he has is unjustifiable downmods + running away from a challenge. So much for superiority of registered 'lusers' vs. ac posters.

Re:Why did you reply as AC then, troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point and reverse psychology, catching that troll in projecting his own modus operandi he clearly showed his tell on.

Re:LMAO - "Pot calling the kettle black"... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better reverse psychology once more catching the troll in projecting his modus operandi he showed his tell on.

"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157

* So much for the "superiority" of "registered 'lusers'" vs. AC posters eh?

APK

P.S.=> See subject-line above, & you're only showing us how NOT "superior" you registered 'lusers' really are vs. AC's like myself & the OP you 'cut down' on the basis of his posting AC vs. YOU posting as a "registered 'luser'"

(No, not all registered users are that way, just YOU in this case - since you 'cut down' the OP as you did? I am CUTTING YOU UP, in return... you like??)...

After all - UNTIL YOU SHOW US YOU'VE DONE MORE, BETTER, & EARLIER than I have in the art & science of computing + in the eyes of those in esteemed publications, trade show contests + other reviews, as well as having YOUR CODE GO INTO COMMERCIALLY SOLD WARES by certified MS partners?

You show us you're actually INFERIOR to us AC's!

So much for "the superiority" of you "registered 'lusers'", vs. us AC posters, eh?

You "registered 'luser'" so-called "SUPERIORS" of us AC users should be able to put me to shame on the account of superiority then in accomplishments in the art & science of computing easily right?

FUNNY YOU CAN'T & RAN from that SIMPLE challenge, "forrest"... lol!

... apk

Explain this "MIGHTY registered 'luser'"

[Anonymous Coward]

Difference is you registered fools cheat the moderation system! Proof? Ok, simple:

Explain this -> How did I get downmodded here -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872665

Especially for RIGHTFULLY chastising an ADD/ADHD + Dyslexic mentally addled troll for his utterly REPREHENSIBLE BEHAVIOR using "troll tricks" in "misreading" others points trying to put words in the OP's mouth he NEVER said which the rest of us understood perfectly, trapping that troll?

(Later, he was trolling ADMITTEDLY & harassing the OP I defended)...

And then, the ADMITTED TROLL I chastised for his reprehensible behavior got upmodded to +5 INSIGHTFUL for admitting his doing wrong & ADMITTING IT while he harassed others -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41872031

?

(No, you fools only show us how you operate... nothing more!)

Ever wonder WHY the rest of the internet thinks /. is dying? Don't - YOU "registered 'luser'" wannabe 'superiors' to us AC posters ARE THE ONES RUINING IT HERE

Case in point/Example thereof:

---

7 Formerly Popular Sites that Are Dying:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/seven-popular-website-dying-110825.html

Guess what site's FIRST ON THAT LIST? No "small wonder" the site's former owners "souled-out" - they have seen it before, as I have, & got out while the getting was good... since, as you can see? Others are noting it also online...

---

NOT ONLY THAT. but since you feel "registered 'lusers'" (easily tracked for trolling SHEEP is more like it, that live for "karma points", lol, like some KID might) are 'superior'? Then, why on earth can't you show you've done MORE, BETTER, & EARLIER than an AC poster like myself did (while you were still in diapers) in the art & science of computing here then:

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157

Hmmm? Why'd you "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" from that SIMPLE challenge? After all, a "superior registered 'luser'" like yourself should EASILY have done more, better, & earlier in the art & science of computing than an AC like me... right? WRONG!

YOU RUNNING AWAY LIKE THAT "FORREST"? Shows us all we need to know... lol!

I.E.-> So much for that "registered 'luser'" superiority! It's not... PERIOD!

APK

P.S.=> You're fools, & everyone KNOWS it goes on here, even Mr. Bruce Perens of Open "SORES" fame:

"It just takes one Ubuntu sympathizer or PR flack to minus-moderate any comment. Unfortunately, once PR agencies and so on started paying people to moderate online communities, and to have hundreds of accounts each, things changed." - by Bruce Perens (3872) on Friday July 30 2010, @04:55PM (#33089192) Homepage Journal

FROM -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738364&cid=33089192

it's like you idiots *think* people are stupid, & that your "HBGary" + "Chinese Water Army" tricks ACTUALLY WORK... clue/new NEWS/NewsFlash - they don't, & folks SEE YOU & RIGHT THRU YOU... just like myself!

... apk

Re:40: I'm 55...

[Anonymous Coward]

After a certain age, there is an assumption that if you haven't been promoted to management, there is something wrong with you.

why? why, why, why? What if I don't want to be in management?

"You've been asleep Cap..."... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"For almost 70 yrs..." - quoting Col. Nick Fury from the great film Captain America on that, in regards to YOUR erroneous statement I'll requote now:

"Your boasting of decade old "accomplishments" only serve to highlight that you have no recent accomplishments to speak of. Keep at it champ." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04, @02:00PM (#41873471)

No, untrue - lately, & yes, in the past too, they're just of a DIFFERENT NATURE than doing freeware/shareware that some of it even became highly-esteemed commercially sold ware, that's all (& yet, not of a different nature, since I do have this freeware out there - & I really sort of DO consider it my "Captain America shield" in a way by analogy):

---

APK Hosts File Engine 5.0++ 32-bit & 64-bit:

http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74

What have /.'er thought ot it so far? Ok:

APK Hosts File Engine 5.0++: 2012 -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3137925&cid=41429093

Upward moderated...

---

Custom hosts files gain me the following benefits (A short summary of where custom hosts files can be extremely useful):

---

1.) Blocking out malware/malscripted sites.
2.) Blocking out Known sites-servers/hosts-domains that are known to serve up malware.
3.) Blocking out Bogus DNS servers malware makers use.
4.) Blocking out Botnet C&C servers.
5.) Blocking out Bogus adbanners that are full of malicious script content.
6.) Blocking out known spammers &/or phishers.
7.) Blocking out TRACKERS.
8.) Getting you back speed/bandwidth you paid for by blocking out adbanners + hardcoding in your favorite sites (faster than remote DNS server resolution).
9.) Added reliability (vs. downed or misdirect/poisoned DNS servers).
10.) Added "anonymity" (to an extent, vs. DNS request logs).
11.) The ability to bypass DNSBL's (DNS block lists you may not agree with).
12.) More screen "real estate" (since no more adbanners appear onscreen eating up CPU, Memory, & other forms of I/O too - bonus!).
13.) Truly UNIVERSAL PROTECTION (since any OS, even on smartphones, usually has a BSD drived IP stack).
14.) Faster & MORE EFFICIENT operation vs. browser plugins (which "layer on" ontop of Ring 3/RPL 3/usermode browsers & are generally written in slower INTERPRETED languages (e.g. AdBlock = python/perl/javascript)- Whereas by way of comparison, the hosts file operates @ the Ring 0/RPL 0/Kernelmode of operation (far faster) as a filter for the IP stack itself which is written in C & Assembly language...).
15.) Custom hosts files work on ANY & ALL webbound apps (browser plugins do not).
16.) Custom hosts files offer a better, faster, more efficient way, & safer way to surf the web & are COMPLETELY controlled by the end-user of them.

---

What do 100's of /.'ers THINK OF CUSTOM HOSTS FILES? OK again:

---

* THE HOSTS FILE GROUP 38++ THUSFAR (from +5 -> +1 RATINGS, usually "informative" or "interesting" etc./et al):

APPLYING HOSTS TO DIFF. PLATFORM W/ TCP-IP STACK BASED ON BSD: 2008 -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1944892&cid=34831038
HOSTS MOD UP:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1490078&cid=30555632
HOSTS MOD UP:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1461288&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=30272074
HOSTS MOD UP:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1255487&cid=28197285
HOSTS MOD UP:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1206409&cid=27661983
0.0.0.0 in HOSTS:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1197039&cid=27556999
0.0.0.0 IN HOSTS:2009 -> ht

Started at 50, still going at 64, and I'm a girl!

[DOK2]

In the late 90's, there was a huge demand for web developers during the dot-com boom. After a long and successful career in finance and accounting, I built a huge Excel model that projected my company's financial statements out five years. Excel > VBA > VB6 > voila! This was way more fun than accounting. I got myself hired by a bespoke software development outfit in 1999 when I was 52, the only girl in a roomful of 20-something guys. I've pretty much been the only girl around since then -- the only one at work, the only one at the dev events & meetups. And always the oldest guy in the room. Right now, I am finishing up a mobile- and tablet-friendly web app done up in ASP.Net MVC4 with jQuery Mobile for a global corporation. It's been a wonderful project. I "had" to buy an iPad to test my app, which rocks on my Droid. I'm hoping to be able to do more web-to-mobile apps. This stuff is wonderful fun. I love making things. I love hitting F5 and magick happens. I compare my work to being a restaurant chef. I don't care that I am a faceless invisible worker back in the kitchen. I love imagining the client's delight when the plate is placed in front of them, my work, my product.

Odd topic

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems very odd to me. I'm 49 and I never thought of programming as a young person's career. Sure, it started out that way because there were so few of us. But now? I think this question brings to light a more deeply rooted bias and THAT is what we should be talking about.

Over 65 and do SQL queries every mortning ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I am over 65, still write books on SQL, but I make sure that I do at least one query every day by posting to SQL forums. My goal in the near furture is to be published in Esperanto, which is much cooler than Klingon. My body might not be what it was, but I want my brain to die last :)

Re:40: I'm 55...

[lsatenstein]

I've been programming since 1977, and I'm still doing it, although my job description hasn't had "programmer" in it since 1984:

(My first job out of university was writing digital signal analysis sw for a research institute, I did that from 1981 to 84.)

During the last few years I've been involved with crypto (AES) and graphics optimization, multicore computing as well as a few programming competitions:
I suspect that I'm probably 20 years older than most of the other quarter/semi-finalists at the two Facebook Hacker Challenges.

The main/only/sufficient reason is of course that I love doing it!

Solving puzzles is something I would pay to do, so getting paid is a great deal imho.

(My official job these days is to be the in-house IT troubleshooter for a very large Norwegian IT company, I manage to sneak in some programming here as well, often some Perl to analyze network trace/log files.)

Terje

=====
It is great to know that you love programming. I call programming architecture and implementation.
I program in C and have been doing Assembly, Cobol, C and some C++ ever since graduation some 40 years ago.
I am 72 and just completed 8 separate applications in with Des / Des3 encryption.

57: Coding is my life (n/t)

[Anonymous Coward]

57: Coding is my life

Illogical ad hominem attacks AND

[Anonymous Coward]

Attempting to "impersonate" me now as well? LMAO - please... grow up, & get on topic!

* Of course, I haven't seen any of you "so-called 'superior' registered 'lusers'" outdo me in accomplishments in the art & science of computing either, per my challenge to you there also -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157

(So much for "superior registered 'lusers'"... lol, they're PROVING they're not - & that they can't get the better of "lil' ole ME" the ac poster... fact, so far @ least, & I predict it will REMAIN that way too!)

APK

P.S.=> Attempts @ impersonating me are only FURTHER "giving away your tell" & a sign of a defeated troll:

"I take it all back I have an IQ of 20 and smell like feet and BO. ... apk" - by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05, @01:46PM (#41884331)

Actually, my IQ (per standardized tests) ranges between 130-135 on standardized tests I've taken, typically! Now, should YOURS be higher, even if allegedly (& I have ZERO reasons to lie about mine), by comparison?

Clue/New NEWS/NewsFlash:

ALL THE BRAINS/IQ IN THE WORLD AREN'T WORTH SPIT IF YOU DON"T WORK HARD TO USE IT FOR THE GOOD OF OTHERS WITH USEFUL CREATIONS FROM THAT INTELLECT!

(Since being of service to your fellow man IS how you gain "notoriety" in the first place - the greater the overall good of your service is to the most people, the greater the fame & other rewards!)

Edison said it well enough, with his "Genius is 1% inspiration, & 99% perspiration"... & he was correct.

Now, per the discussion with "Oligoncella" & his "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" maneuvers/evasions here vs. a SIMPLE challenge I gave his "Superior registered 'luser'" self, vs. us AC's:

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157

The funniest part of all is that for all the "geek superiority" around here, I see VERY FEW OF YOU accomplishing anything worthwhile in the art & science of computing, especially vs. "lil' ole AC poster ME"...

So, that "all said & aside" & fact?

Small wonder you all can't match or exceed that SMALL & ONLY PARTIAL LIST of my favorite accomplishments of mine in the art & science of computing above, eh? Not...

(Plus - sorry to disappoint you, but I use deodorant + clean myself & my clothes, so... quit "projecting" your OWN inadequacies onto myself, troll...)

... apk

Impersonating me AGAIN (2nd time)?

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject-line... says it all, & of course, that & where you impersonated me earlier in this exchange too -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41884331

* You're only proving my points here, & the MAIN one? That you "Registered 'lusers'" who *think* you're "superior" to us AC's, per Oligoncella's rants? Are ANYTHING but that... & easily tracked INFERIOR 'sheeple', nothing more!

APK

P.S.=> I gave Oligoncella a "fair shake" & made what SHOULD have been a SIMPLE challenge for his "superior" registered 'luser' self, by having him show he's accomplished MORE, better, & EARLIER than I have in the art & science of computing... has he done so? Not SO far... or ever, I predict!

Yes - so much for "superior registered 'lusers'" around /., eh? Talk?? It's cheap - deeds are not, & you don't have any, any of you, do you??

Evidently not... lol!

Well, lol - Then, You just KNOW I've just GOTTA say it, as-is-per-my-usual "inimitable style":

THIS? This was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'", but then again?

It always IS, vs. these operating on illusions of superiority "registered 'lusers'" who haven't, & WON'T ever, accomplish SQUAT in this art & science of computing (part of which is the topic here) - even vs. "lil' ole ME" the ac poster...

... apk

"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!", lmao... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you STILL RUNNING, Forrest? See here, prove you've done MORE, better, & EARLIER than I have in the art & science of computing then, since you're "the SUPERIOR registered 'luser'", right? Go for it -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3229253&cid=41879157

* That's all, pretty simple...

APK

P.S.=> Seeing you REDUCED to not only off-topic b.s., but also illogical failing ad hominem attacks + now resorting to attempting to "impersonate" me also?

Please...

Man - You're just giving away your 'tell' & telegraphing you're ON THE ROPES by this point, with nothing to show for your "superior registered 'luser'" self in terms of actual accomplishments in the art & science of computing vs. an "inferior" ac poster like "lil' ole' ME"... lol!

Fact - so far @ least...

... apk

Re:You haven't done anything since Windows NT

[Anonymous Coward]

where by way of comparison you haven't done anything.

Test driven development about when tests written

[drew_eckhardt]

I'm not convinced by TDD though, I do it but I've never really needed it in all the years of coding I've been doing. I prefer to write up test harnesses that exercise more of the system in a larger granularity. ie, instead of writing tests that exercise a method, I prefer to exercise a class - and then the test I write can be an example of how to use that class if it involves setting up, configuring it to whatever task you want, and then making it do work.

I also find this helps find more bugs than traditional TDD, eg the time I had a network class that had methods to set ip address and port, but if you set the port first, it would fail (as setting ip would first initialise the entire internal address variables). TDD doesn't find those bugs, and they're the ones I'm more interested in.

Test driven development dictates when you write test cases (before the next increment of product code which can be validated) not what they test or the abstraction level at which they operate. When you're applying the methodology for it's benefits (other than getting you consulting income or giving you a religion to follow) that can be one method, a stack of programs, a class, or whatever point of the spectrum makes the most sense in terms of coverage provided and difficulty reproducing and fixing any bugs that are uncovered.

For reliable non-trivial systems with state (real world examples I've done include replicated NOSQL and block storage appliances using shared nothing clusters) this can take even take the form of a software model describing correct operation, mock environment providing deterministic execution order, and event/timing (including faults) combinations which vary according to a state search strategy and/or pseudo-random approach so you cover situations that you do not anticipate.

As a tangent that sort of testing is uncommon although neglecting to do it leads to huge problems. Google replaced a commercial replicated light weight database because it did not work and mentions the issue in passing in _Paxos made live_. In _MODIST: Transparent model checking of unmodified distributed systems_ Microsoft research applies model checking to three production systems with one running commercially on 100,000 machines and finds protocol errors in all three. I once found a five year old data loss bug in a shipping storage product when I did that and had a new guy fix it in his first week on the job.

The advantage is when you write the test in relation to the product code. Developed up front it's more likely to influence product code encapsulations and APIs to make test easier so you get better coverage and spend less time tracking down root causes. Since testing the code you just wrote doesn't block on writing the test the context switch overhead to fix the bugs you introduce the total cost to fix them is lower.

When misguided managers think "we'll add quality later" and try to cut corners on test development (they often get demoted and replaced after ship dates slip too much, but that can take a long time whilst your life is made unpleasant) it's not possible for them to ship a product prematurely (the product code is not done) and harder for them to damage the release.

As your software becomes more trivial the importance of doing this is less; although such simple work is easier to outsource or delegate to lower paid junior employees so more senior engineers might not have to deal with such situations for too long.

62

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess I can't claim to be the oldest one here, but at 62 I'm far from the youngest. Started with Fortran IV on card decks in ~1969, have done everything from Prolog (loved it) to XSLT (hate it) over the years. It's a good day at the office when I can fit in some coding time, and a bad day when all I get to do is go to meetings, edit reports, and check timesheets.

Fortran, PL-1, Pascal, 360 Assembler, Prolog, Lisp, C, Visual Basic, CQL (proprietary language written on top of Smalltalk), Python, Perl, XML and XSLT, LaTeX, XFST and SFST (finite state tools). No Cobol.

Re:Test driven development about when tests writte

[gbjbaanb]

ah, but you're not talking of TDD as found in many systems, you're talking about TDD as it was originally envisaged.... they're well different. So much so that the term BDD is almost what TDD used to be before the auto-generation tool took over and made everyone think they were doing test-driven development by clicking the "make tests from my code" button that creates a set of stubs, 1 per method.

[sarcasm]Isn't reflection great.. just look at the cool things you do with it... [/sarcasm]

so anyway, I dislike TDD because of this, though it has its place as a way to easily put little "checking" tests in. For the serious stuff, we use a couple of "BDD" tools like dbfit, behat and cucumber.

Since you took the time to write...

[BenEnglishAtHome]

So the answer to all the misogyny you've built up over your lifetime is to exploit women using money as a tool?

You've got that quite backwards. They're the ones earning the money. The exploitation is running in precisely the opposite direction.

More to the point, you say "misogyny". I say "lessons learned the hard way." I spent 30 years of adolescence and adulthood emulating my father, one of the kindest, gentlest, most respectful and respectable men in the universe. He had a wife who adored him despite the fact that he was far from handsome or wealthy; she loved him because he was a good man, period, full stop. Mom, by the way, was a smokin' hottie, enough so that my teenage friends creeped me out leering at her. Think: Racquel Welch's near-twin.

From the two of them, I learned a great fairy tale. I learned that good women loved men who were good because they were good men and that no other factors could derail that happy outcome. It took me decades to realize that my parents were a statistical outlier so far beyond the norm that it beggars description. The fact that they found each other was wonderful. So is winning the lottery. Both are about as likely.

Fantastic. Well done.

Thanks. I think so.

For the rest of us, who have built actual relationships with women as people,...

I never said I didn't have relationships. Let me clarify. I don't have *romantic* relationships.

we pity your total lack of understanding of the opposite sex,

I'd feel the same way if I didn't think I understood them. Unfortunately, I do.

But most of all we pity the fact you think you can get better social intercourse with someone you're paying to be nice to you than we can from people we've spent decades of our life working alongside.

That's an overstatement. I've "worked alongside", professionally, any number of women who consider me a great guy. Very high quality social intercourse came from those relationships.

It's just that none of them would fuck me if I was the last man on earth. They wouldn't hesistate to ask me to come over on a Saturday ("Bring your pickup; my boyfriend and I are moving to a new apartment.") but there are only so many times in a mans life when he's willing to ask a woman out on a date and get uncontrollable laughter as a response. (No, that is not an exaggeration; I've lost track of the number of times.)

Eventually, we find a different path.

Side note - My mom used to have some words for me that she thought were comforting. She'd say "Most women haven't yet been beaten up badly enough by life to appreciate a man as nice as you. Your day will come."

My response was usually "Yeah, Mom, at about roughly the time I go into a retirement home. I suppose I'll have plenty of tail, then, rolling their wheelchairs down the hall to my room."

Mom would laugh. It was a joke. But I think we both understood the truth of that little exchange and cried a little inside.

I'm sure your favourite prostitute will be crying a river at your funeral.

No one will cry. I have no family that will survive me and I will have no funeral. I long ago accepted that I will someday die in a small room, alone, staring at a blank wall. My attorney has my will and will disperse my few belongings. My cremated remains will be interred in the family plot without ceremony. There will be no mourning.

Believe it or not, recognizing the scope of ones successes and failures in life is oddly comforting. If you find my attitudes mysogynystic, then that's your call to make. Personally, I simply recognize that everyone fails at some thing(s) in life. I've had a success or two, here or there, that have made the world a slightly better place for a person or two. But I've failed at love often enough to give up trying.

You say mysogyny. I say I've simply grown tired of beating my head against that particular brick wall.