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The Grumpy Programmer has Advice for Young Computer Workers (Video)
Bob Pendleton calls his blog "The Grumpy Programmer" because he's both grumpy and a programmer. He's also over 60 years old and has been programming since he was in his teens. This pair of videos is a break from our recent spate of conference panels and corporate people. It's an old programmer sharing his career experiences with younger programmers so they (you?) can avoid making his mistakes and possibly avoid becoming as grumpy as he is -- which is kind of a joke, since Bob is not nearly as grumpy as he is light-hearted. (Transcript covers both videos. Alternate Video Link One; Alternate Video Link Two)
"Bob Pendleton calls his blog "The Grumpy Programmer" because he's both grumpy and a programmer."
Thanks, Rob!!
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
The transcript reads like a conversation between two guys with almost nothing to say. I'm honestly not sure what my takeaway from this should have been. Guy was a working programmer for 30 years (unemployed for the last 12+), and now he's... ...a guy making small-talk in a video?
Help me understand what I missed.
Robin Miller: But age discrimination in employment, have you encountered?
Bob Pendleton: Oh, absolutely. I got laid off on my 49th birthday and haven’t been able to find a full time job since.
One piece of advice I always give younger engineers and programmers is to be increasingly vigilant about your career as you age. In the last decade or so before retirement one is very vulnerable to layoffs, because one's salary is high and one's formal education was a long time ago.
Anyone remember that old poster? It used to hang in an older professor's office back in school. I think he took it seriously too (not a humorous sort, that guy). The rest of us took it as bit of a joke -- a joke as in "Every old fart programmer thinks the next generation is doing it all wrong."
Ironically, that was 20 years ago, and so now I'm an old(er) fart myself. But I'll resist the urge to tell all the newbies how *MY* generation got it right and THEIR GENERATION sucks.
And get off my lawn!!!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It is sad to see that Mr. Pendleton had an experience similar to my own. I was laid off the year I turned 48. Unlike him, however, I stayed in management despite hating it and still became unemployed. I hope Mr. Pendleton finds success and happiness in whatever he chooses.
It is, in fact, John Warnock who founded Adobe.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Stay away! Long hours, crappy pay working for a company that will use you for everything you are worth, chew you up, and when you turn 35-40, will spit you out. Only those few who specialized in now ancient technologies will have any prospects beyond age 40. The worst part is, there is no such thing as job security. No matter how much of a rockstar you are, at any time you are at risk of being replace by a kid from India or China, if for no other reason than the CTO needs a few extra dollars to get a new company Lexus.
Sure, the idea of joining a startup and becoming an overnight billionaire sounds appealing, but except for a very small handful, IT WONT HAPPEN. If you want to join the Video Game Industry, all this same stuff applies, only cranked up to 11!
For your own sake, stay away. Don't make the same mistake that I made. Get a real job, spend time with your family, go outside and enjoy life.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I'm one of these grumpies. Some of what I had to say may be useful to the wet-behind-the-year dopes. Not likely, though, because, back when I was at their age, I didn't listen to the old geezers, and that both helped me as well as screwed me.
So, given the rapid speed of change in the landscape of IT industry, I have to wonder how relevant our experiences and lessons would be to the young'uns.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Living like this won't necessarily make you grumpy. Check out Happy. Long-term happiness is attained by a combination of these three things: 1) participation in a community, 2) having a self-cultivating hobby, 3) engaging in altruistic behavior. Also, time spent in flow-state helps.
One need not marry, have kids, or live opulently in order to have these things.
I guess I get why there may be some ties between programming and poetry, but it's not my thing. I wonder what the ex-English-professor would have said about a novelist?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Turns out being a COBOL programmer isn't a guaranteed job for life in the age of the Cloud.
It's 2014 and we still have streaming video served up as FLASH???? ON SLASHDOT?!?!?!?!?! What a joke.
I am not sure there's much advice us older programmers can give new developers because the industry is a lot different now.
In the old days we were often tasked with solving a problem, and we were more-often free to use whatever tools and technology were best, and we also thought of development environments as tools, which we could switch out if the application required something different. We also did all our own testing. I recently worked with a younger programmer on a project and it was miserable. He couldn't give me 20 lines of code that didn't have a bug in it, because he was dependent upon having some QA person test his work and an IDE that would hilight every mistake.
Nowadays there is so much abstraction going on in programming, people don't really seem like they're programming as much as they're using some sort of GUI development tool and plodding through innumerable amounts of API documentation and going on witch-hunts to try and figure out why something that's documented to work, doesn't actually work. I remember a big Oracle project I was on where my software wouldn't work properly and I couldn't figure out why. It took me several months of bitching on usenet to finally get a rep within Oracle contact me privately and tell me I wasn't crazy, they knew about the bug and just weren't acknowledging it. In the old days, there wasn't as much of that going on. Programming was simpler and less bureaucratic.
Get off my lawn! /. captcha.
Er I mean
GET OFF MY LAWN!
Thanks
I did linux kernel development and low-level posix stuff for over a decade, and there's still plenty of work there. I've now moved on to cloud computing, but on the backend infrastructure side. Lots of stuff happening there too...
His blog has only 8 posts total. Is this some kind of joke?!
True! I am disappointed by his lack of grumpiness. The only thing worse is if more slashdot videos are added for Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey.
He looks older than my 70 year old dad
Code error highlighting is nice, but if done from the start, can breed laziness. My deal, I started as and html monkey using Dreamweaver when I was 25, first job. Now I'm 40 doing OOP PHP, Nginx proxies, load balancing, a bit of Perl, and MySQL tuning. The bulk of which is using VIM along with GIT to preserve it all. Best move ever was going to VIM and taking the training wheels off. With that I work in news media which requires a bunch of duct tape code to make a bunch of grumpy APIs work together and it is inherently chaotic, which makes it all fun.
when I discovered that he doesn't bother to proofread or use a spell checker.
I don't care how long he's been doing it, sloppiness is a sign of a poor programmer.
CEOs are technically employed, but they do not REALLY work do they.
Attend meetings, read the internet, attend meetings, play golf, fly a jet or two, stay in hotels, travel to other meetings, oh tell the PA to do a,b,c,d.
CEOs arent super human, their brain capacity is not 20x average. Im sure any seasoned programmer could do what a CEO does, remember more details, understand tech better.
Oh but the real skills come in social engineering and getting that billion dollar deal, by tricking the client.
Programmers are TOO HONEST! "yeah this server is shit, its capacity is poor", CEO says, "it will solve all solutions , no admin needed"
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
So those 30 year olds hiring people, immediately cut off any one with more than 10 years experience do they?
Do they assume those people will be listening to beatles music and be old shits, type slow, or like 4:3 screens, and use vi?
Time flies, all those 30yr olds will be 40 soon.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
And that's why, if you can, you go back to college to get a Bachelor or Masters degree when you get into your late 30's early 40's.
That is the worst possible advice you could possibly give, except I guess for killing yourself.
That is when instead of SPENDING ALL YOUR SAVINGS ON SOMETHING THAT WILL NOT MATTER, you should instead think about switching to consulting and increasing your earnings. Can't find a full-job easily past 40-50? Learn to make people pay what you are really worth for the vast amounts of experience you have, because that is worth a lot, save up what you can and enjoy retirement eventually, possibly a lot earlier than you would have if you burned your money like an idiot getting a business degree so you could be unemployed with all the younger business majors who cannot find jobs either.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why is using vi (vim) a bad thing? IMO it shows dedication and a drive for improving productivity if someone goes through the madness that is getting started with it.
I'm 23 and recently switched from notepad++ as my main text editor to vim for everything that is not java (setting up eclim is next on the list). After the initial time investment it was absolutely worth it just for editing speed and fun. As an added bonus I can now edit files on a server over ssh 5x the speed of my GUI-dependent co-workers.
And 4:3 screens are still better than 16:9 for coding, with 16:10 being the best. Actually, I'm using two 1600x1200 screens to write this and wouldn't trade them for 1920x1080.
As I near the end of a nominally successful electrical engineering career that spans the humble analog beginnings of automation to the roboticized present, I can look back and smile at what a smart-assed punk kid I was, deriding the old-timers with snot-nosed comments and the immeasurable over-confidence of youth.
Barring an early death, everyone gets old. Know what? I neither desire nor require the respect or veneration of the young. I got mine. As jobs get scarcer and pay less with each passing year, all I can say to the smartaleck young snerts is, "Suck it. See you in St. Croix."
On the other hand, ask me nicely and I'm happy to lend a helping hand.
Respect is a two-way street with no speed limit.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I was kind of confused about the message and intent of the videos. If the goal is to give advice to those who want to continue programming as a career beyond their 40's and into their 60's, it might make more sense to interview somebody who has managed to do that. I guess the idea was to avoid doing what he did.
The advice seemed to come down to this: Take care of yourself and work for the government or just skip a career in programming altogether. The rest was made up of miscellaneous recollections.
I was curious enough to look at his blog. Though he's only posted sporadically, he does come across as a very intelligent guy with a graduate degree that still has something to give the industry, though I'm not sure in what capacity. He was a teacher for awhile and that seems to have been a good fit but it sounds like health issues ended that part of his career.
Outside of management, keeping ones career going all the way through to retirement can be a challenge in technical fields. Part of that is pure discrimination but I would also guess that in many cases companies get are getting more per dollar spent out of younger employees. How does one combat that as they age? Some do it successfully. Is becoming a consultant or moving into management the only way to go?
So next to your CS degree you are going to need a fine arts major and better be a published author, recognized composer or important contemporary painter on top of 50+ years of working experience in a technology that's been around for 5 years oh and please do not be older than 25 because we all know from your 30s it is downhill, you cost 300 times "too much", experience doesn't mean anything and your are "not flexible".
It is becoming absolutely ridiculous what people seem to think a "real programmer" should have in terms of traits or characteristics and qualifications, and blogs like these add to the quaint conception. How about you HR drones pick a decent, common sense guy with roughly the qualifications regardless of age and establish a good working environment where you are making sure you train people and enable them to do a good job and grow in their knowledge and skill instead of looking for the one "rockstars" to save your death-march project, the "rockstar" whom you are going to pay a shamefully low salaries?
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
The message I got was: either become a brain-dead manager (technologically speaking, of course :) ) by the time you reach your 40s or work for the government if you want to stay employed in the field. I managed to make it to 61 without becoming a manager, so I guess that's not too bad. And he's right about allowing yourself to be attached to your code: don't. As hard as it may seem to be able to do that, don't forget it's just code.
Your only security is the money in the bank (or investment).
Even if your house is paid off, you still have to pay your property taxes, insurance (home and auto), food, water, power or you will lose that home.
Here is what I wish I knew 10 - 15 years ago...you can learn from my mistake (I am successfully doing this today as you should be.):
Follow Jim Cramer's Homework and Buy method of investing. Watch Mad Money Monday through Friday on CNBC at 6pm EDT. Pay $199 for his Action Alerts and follow along until you learn how. Read two of his many books: 'Sane Investing in an Insane World' and 'Get Rich Carefully' and follow his method of investing and you should be able to retire by year 8, 9 or 10 even with a minimum wage job. (And as a Programmer, you better be making more than minimum wage!)
No more fears of age discrimination by age 35 to 45 any longer as they need you, but you do not need them. That is real power and real stability, how much money you can generate each and every year for the rest of your life. As long as you are dependent on others, you will be at risk to become a laid off programmer that many will not hire. Heaven help you after 45 if you still have to work...our society does not want you to receive a retirement any more. And if that 401K is not managed by YOU...the reason its not growing are the hidden fees sucked out each and every year by whomever manages it for you. Waht a farce.
Here is how I got the $140 per week: .36 percent tax rate, hopefully you have an accountant and are not paying 36%.)
$14,336.00 = ($7 per hour * 2048 hours per year) (takes out vacation, sick, etc...) = $14,336.00 per year in salary.
- $5,160.96 ($14,336.00 *
========
$ 9,175.04 ~ (after tax yearly income on a job paying $7 per hour, should you get taxed at the max rate of 36%)
$ 176.44 ~ ($9,175.04 / 52 weeks)
$ -140.00 ~ saved each week to be ready to invest and not touch for at least 8 years....
========
$ 36.44 ~ what you have left over to live on, after taxes and saving $140 to be invested.
$ 140.00 ~ If the minimum wage is raised to $11 per hour, you will be able to invest $140 and have $140 per week to live on. Perhaps if your car is paid off and you have no mortgage or rent payment you can do this...good luck if you do not do this while you are programming and making better than a minimum wage. Still would be hard if you have to many monthly revolving expenses above and beyond mortgage or rent...do your self a favor and limit any and all revolving charges.
Assumption: You save $140 per week in an account ready to be invested. When that account reaches between $750 and $2,000 you buy 20 - 25 shares of a stock costing between $30 and $80 per shares (see break out below). If you do this for 8 years, you will be close to $125,000.00 in your stock portfolio and earning more than $20,000 each and every year for the rest of your life.
Here is how it could work for anywone, even with a close ot minimum wage or minimum wage job.:
$140 per week ~ minimum in an investment account, when that account gets up over $750 dollars, buy 20 - 25 shares of a lower priced stock that you have personnally done the homework on.
$125,000.00 ~ Takes 8 - 10 years if only investing $140 per week. Faster if you invest more p
so many programmers think that programming is a cool and important job that requires a ton of skill and talent and dedication.
That remains true.
and then they learn at around 40 that is all a load of old bollocks, hence the reason companies have outsourced much of it to 3rd world places.
Who are mostly neither talented nor dedicated and produce crap...
so to keep being employed in IT, you need to change with it,
No, you need to leave IT and be hired back at a far higher rate to fix the mess caused by people who think they are programmers but are neither talented or dedicated.
No worse hell that managing an offshoring project and watching future failure being built into the system. I will not do it and neither should anyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can still rail ( no joke) about how stupid Java is. I worked at Sun until 2004 and haven't worked a day since, now at age 67, but I used to be pissed off but I am not as much as I used to be. About six months ago I became enamored with Python, which I still respect. I am very impressed with the concepts of Literate Programming and reproducable results as I started off linking FORTRAN code with math and statistics libraries as a so-called scientific programmer. Now the researchers are able to do all this by themselves using ipython notebook and numpy and matplotlib and a host of other libraries. That is a road I still want to progress further down, but I got destracted in the competition, emacs org.mode. Now I have used emacs pretty much constantly over the years but never really did everything in it. but was really impressed by org.mode which rekindled my interest in emacs and lisp. I had looked at Common-lisp a couple of years ago, and being quite interested in contrapuntal music, I was interested in lisp off and on as the platform for music composition.
But what is amazing to me, as an old man , is how things are coming around, and not only just that but how old things are addressing the weaknesses of things that have had quite a following in the intervening and being told as a result "Your skills are out of date, old fashioned" when the young fools who were interviewing were enamored with Java or PhP or Javascript, all of which make me grumpy to some extant. I am amazed how lisp is now at the center of the Universe both for addressing failings in object oriented programming with side-effects, but offering real solutions to long standing issues such as concurancy and functional verses imparitive programming, and how old these issues are. Relearning elisp and learning something like Clojure really is now center stage for using Java and Javascript and other languages to address their very failings. How Ironic.
Even though I understand the intellectual progression of the evolution of programming represented here, and it is very fun to understand, I don't have much illusion that I could be a productive programmer ever again because even if you understand some useful concepts from computer science and can go back and read Knuth and Dygstra, if you can't type very well due to failing vision, your aren't going to get very far. Like the grumpy programmer I have aspirations as a writer reveraled in what I have written on the Internet over the years even though it is scattered about.