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)

Comments

First sentence

[HairyNevus]

"Bob Pendleton calls his blog "The Grumpy Programmer" because he's both grumpy and a programmer."

Thanks, Rob!!

;-P

Re:First sentence

[Anonymous Coward]

Blackadder: "I seek information about a Wisewoman."
Young Crone: "Ah, the Wisewoman... the Wisewoman."
Blackadder: "Yes, the Wisewoman."
Young Crone: "Two things, my lord, must thee know of the Wisewoman. First, she is... a woman. And second, she is..."
Blackadder: "Wise?"
Young Crone: "You do know her then?"
Blackadder: "No, just a wild stab in the dark which is, incidentally, what you'll be getting if you don't start being a bit more helpful."

Transcript...

[mythosaz]

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.

Re:Transcript...

[grcumb]

The transcript reads like a conversation between two guys with almost nothing to say.

Because a real grumpy programmer doesn't fucking talk on a fucking video. A real grumpy programmer uses text, just like he always did, to write about how those hipster fucks who think they have even half a fucking clue deserve get run out of town on the Rails they rode in on.

A real grumpy programmer still fucking hates Microsoft, but can't be arsed even to hold down the shift key long enough to type a '$' - even though those monopolistic fucks in Redmond deserve it. Develop my ass, Ballmer.

A real grumpy programmer knows what C is for, but the pissant little twerps who bitch about the lack of strong typing in Perl can go get fucked, because fuck you, that's why. And fuck your Web 2 Point fucking Oh, and fuck your Twitter and fuck your fucking FuckBook.

And that, my child, is what a real grumpy programmer looks like, because get the fuck off my fucking lawn you ignorant little turd polisher.

Re:Transcript...

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

I learned that many programmers are musicians or good at various art forms. Which surprised me because I was a good programmer and can't play a musical instrument or do anything artistic at all.

I learned that if you're a coder, you'd better have a career change lined up before you're too far along into your 40's.

I learned that when you're older if you lose your job, good luck getting re-employed.

I learned that if you want life long income from writing code, you'd have been well off to learn legacy languages and operating systems and get a job with a large business or the government. In fact, doing that now would leave you with a lot less competition for highly specialized work and you'd largely be competing with old farts for jobs.

I learned how to reduce stress.

As a code writer from the 70's through the early 90's and the manager of programmers through early 2000's, followed by watching almost everyone I know who did it lose their jobs in their early 50's and go through hell to find work, seems like all of that is not only reliable but pretty important.

That's without going back and re-reading the transcript.

Speaking as a grumpy

[oldhack]

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.

Re:Incredibly wise advice

[ShanghaiBill]

And also, don't get married, because divorces tend to wipe out 50-70 percent of your net worth.

Or just don't get divorced. It is common knowledge that half of all marriages end in divorce. But that hides huge variations. If both partners have college degrees, the divorce rate is about 20%. If both have engineering degrees, it is about 10%. It helps to marry someone trained in problem solving, and capable of rational thinking.

Re:Incredibly wise advice

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to marry someone ... capable of rational thinking.
 
Well, once you get past the gay marriage issue you're kind of SOL.

Re:Incredibly wise advice

[Skarjak]

-_-

2014...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2014 and we still have streaming video served up as FLASH???? ON SLASHDOT?!?!?!?!?! What a joke.

Different ages of development

[mabu]

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.

Re:Different ages of development

[Art3x]

I liked the part about poetry. That rings true. I came to programming from writing. They have a lot in common.

I am not sure there's much advice us older programmers can give new developers because the industry is a lot different now.

Experience counts. It's wiser to hire someone with 25 instead of 5 years experience. I generally get better results from the elders, whether they are my server admin, plumber, or barber. The years round off rough edges, and they're just more relaxed. They may be grumpy, but they always seem ready to make a joke. In their work they are more methodical and deliberate. They seem to be working slowly, but they finish sooner. They're mainly just less frantic, less wasted motion, more thoughful. There's no problem they can't figure out, eventually. They also are more likely to be the ones to insist on doing the job right, or thoroughly, more than the customer is asking them to. They are more likely to describe something as elegant or know what the word means.

This obsession with youth is sort of like how everything's new "on the Internet." Eventually the gleam will wear off, and society hopefully will realize that it's better to hire old people, just like it's better to hire master plumbers, 60-year-old architects, and gray-haired graphic designers. Steve Jobs, for NeXT's logo, paid $100,000 to Paul Rand, who was 72.

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.

I'm a web programmer in my 30s, but I use vi, psql, and --- well, that's about it.

Re:Programming: You're doing it completely wrong

[spitzak]

Actually more often I have seen the opposite: claims the new stuff is going to be faster, the compiler is not smart enough to figure out that they are the same, and thus you should use the new stuff.

There was a coworker who insisted that using C++ std::foreach for loops was faster because "the compiler knows you can't break out of it and thus can optimize the whole thing". I had two objections to this: first of all it would be a really stupid optimizing compiler that could not figure out there are no "break" statements inside the for loop. And second the C++ was still allowed to throw exceptions in both cases.

The other objection I had was that the functors were unreadable.

Yet another objection is my suspicion that the optimization would be far worse on the functors due to the enormous header files of templates they actually used and I expected the optimizer for the simple for loop to have fewer bugs in it. But I did not test this.

Re:Incredibly wise advice

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

Kids don't have to cost very much. Billions of them are raised around the world for next to nothing. Living below your means and having a good retirement account is a very good idea.

But yeah, marriage is a piss poor idea. You have no idea what you're going to get. My ex wife held her breath for 5.5 years of dating and everything was wonderful. Which ended within days of the ring going on her finger.

The old saying is true: marriages fail because men think that everything will stay the same and women think everything will be different.

I survived financially because most of my assets were earned before we married and weren't community property. There's a reason they call it financial death.